Charles Barkley is ready to leave Inside the NBA — but don’t expect an Aaron Rodgers-style takedown on his way out.
“Yeah, it’s time to go,” Barkley, 63, began on the Wednesday, October 21, broadcast of Mad Dog Sports Radio. “It’s been a great run; I’m grateful and thankful for everything that’s happened to me, but man, I’ll be 64 years old.”
Barkley decided to hang up the mic after his fellow broadcaster Ernie Johnson Jr. revealed his own retirement plan.
“I said, ‘Hey, let’s go out together.’ He told me this a couple of years ago, and he asked me to stay for two years because he was turning 70,” the NBA icon recalled on Wednesday. “I said, ‘You want me to stay for two years, I’ll stay for two years.’ That was last year and this year, so if Ernie changes his mind, I might reconsider, but I don’t see him changing his mind. I would definitely not do the show without Ernie.”
After radio host Adam Schein likened Barkley’s final radio season to Rodgers’ supposed last year in the NFL, Barkley hit back at the comparison.
“I tell you what though, I’m not gonna bury everybody going out the door like Aaron,” Barkley quipped, per Awful Announcing. “I’m not gonna burn every bridge and talk bad about all my exes on my way out the door like he’s doing.”
Rodgers, who has insisted that the 2026 NFL season will be his last, took shots at his respective exes Shailene Woodley and Danica Patrick during a wide-ranging interview on Cam Heyward’s “Not Just Football” podcast last month.
“The height of their fame is when they were with me,” Rodgers, 42, alleged at the time. “They get clicks when they say my name. Just like the idiots on TV get clicks when they say my name because I am a lightning rod.”
Rodgers notably dated Patrick, 44, from 2018 to 2020.
“I dated Danica and she had just retired,” Rodgers recalled on the September podcast episode. “She was depressed and not fun to be around. But I didn’t leave her because I was trying to be there and be a good partner. Then it was going a certain direction, obviously, there was no intimacy, there was nothing.”
Rodgers further claimed that their relationship ended when he turned down the former Nascar driver’s request to jointly buy a house in Malibu, California.
“I said no. She said, ‘Well you know what that means then,’” he alleged. “I said, ‘Yeah, that’s the way things are going.’ She said, ‘Well let’s get counseling.’”
Months after their breakup, Rodgers moved on with Woodley, 34. They confirmed their engagement in 2021 before going their separate ways one year later.
“I dated Shailene. I propose and she says yes. Maybe she felt like she was forced to make a decision. She could have said no,” Rodgers alleged on Heyward’s podcast. “A couple days after that, she tells me, ‘You know, before we get married, I gotta go f*** this guy.’”
Rodgers also hit back on the Emmy winner’s previous claim that the quarterback “ruined her life and gave her crazy depression” for ending their engagement.
“The actuality is, she told me that and then she took off the ring by March [2021]. I proposed in December [2020]. Took off the ring by March,” he alleged. “We had a couple times where we tried to get reunited and nothing ever happened. There wasn’t even a relationship in ‘22 to break off. She literally told me, ‘I don’t want to be with you’ after we tried to have some kind of reconciliation in 2021. There’s just a lot of narratives out there that are just not true.”
Neither Woodley nor Patrick have publicly addressed Rodgers’ claims. Us reached out for comment at the time.
Rodgers has since moved on, announcing in 2025 that he married a woman named Brittani after a private romance.
