“I’m often reminded though of Ted Thompson, as most of you know, just a great general manager, passed away this past year — excuse me, earlier this year, often talked about Aaron, that he’s a comp — and it wasn’t just Aaron, a lot of different players. He would say ‘He’s a complicated fella.’ So, I’ll just say that,” Murphy said, via NBC 26 in Green Bay.
I think Thompson had a dry, clear sense of humor and Murphy just totally butchered that phase...
While not that exact phrase, the South (where Thompson is from) has a lot of short and sweet phrases, categorizing people or their moods or problems...
Like he's a simple boy = not hard to figure out, one track mind etc.
This seems like the same exact thing but the opposite... "complicated fella" meaning it's muliple things, they're focused on determine their mood.
The phrase fits absolutely perfectly with Ted Thompson, the Southern phrases and the Rodgers situation, but Mark Murphy (a Northerner)'s delivery of the phrase (at least in out of context print) looks absolutely horrible! And lacking of context clues to what he means by it... and it's easy to read that he meant to mean something else, when he probably doesn't...
I think Murphy meant to be cute and simple, barrow an interesting line from Thompson, but the context (at least the context of that article) was horrible and the execution of it was horrible by Murphy. He meant well, just trying to say Rodgers thinks about a lot of things... but that end result doesn't look pretty. Hopefully Rodgers knew Thompson well enough to know what (I assume) Murphy was going for there.