Aaron Rodgers has no interest in hiding that he plays quarterback the old way. While the league keeps getting younger and the game keeps changing, Rodgers still runs the Steelers offense with far more hand signals than any other quarterback. Now, wide receiver Michael Pittman Jr. is learning that playing alongside Aaron Rodgers comes with a steep learning curve.

The new Steelers wide receiver has opened up on the chaos of decoding the 42-year-old quarterback’s hand signals.

“Yeah, so Aaron’s style is kind of like throw you into the fire, so when I first got there we didn’t have a single meeting about signals,” Michael Pittman Jr. said (via Jori Epstein’s X post). “Nobody told me, and I’m sitting there trying to ask people, and he’d just look out and give me signals that I’d never seen before, and then he would snap it really quick, and then I would just be wrong.”

Rodgers uses roughly 75 different hand signals before the snap, allowing him to adjust routes, protections, and formations without saying a word. Some of them got a crash course the moment they arrived in Pittsburgh. For instance, Will Howard, a rookie in 2025, was asked to keep track of everything in a shared Google Doc as soon as training camp opened. By his count, the list grew to as many as 75 signals.

“He gave me kind of the baseline of like, ‘All right, hitch, slant, routes, a couple of combinations here and there, some formation signals …'” Howard told Yahoo Sports during training camp. “We would kind of evolve it as we went. So it started off with probably 25, 30 signals and then it ended up being like 75 by the end of [the season].”

Most teams use far fewer signals at the line, coaches and players say, but Rodgers is not most quarterbacks. No other active QB has made 260 regular season starts or won four MVPs. As he has seen more of the game, his signals have grown right along with him.

Teammates know they’d better stay locked in, as Steelers receiver Ben Skowronek told Yahoo Sports, “you better be tuned in,” because “in the huddle, it’s going to be real brief.”

Now Michael Pittman Jr. is the one trying to keep up. Pittsburgh acquired the receiver from the Colts on March 13, 2026, sending a sixth-round pick in exchange for Pittman and a 2026 seventh-round pick. He then agreed to a three-year, $59 million extension.

Learning Rodgers’ language has not been easy for him.

“And I was scrambling to try to learn these signals because he would pull them out anytime, and, like, you get a base amount, and you think that, hey, like, I’ve learned all of them. No, there are 50 more that he’s gonna pull out whenever. But it’s sort of funny because it’s almost like you learn it better once you mess it up the first time because you just don’t want to mess it up again, and it’s not fun going through that.”

His production has also been held back lately. Pittman has caught just two passes in each of the last two games, adding up to 31 yards, and a recurring foot injury kept him out in Week 2. The Steelers hoped the extra rest after last week’s Thursday night game would get him closer to full strength for Week 5 against his old team, the Colts.

That hope looks shaky. At Wednesday’s practice, Pittman was spotted riding a scooter with his foot propped up, according to Nick Farabaugh of PennLive.com. The seventh-year receiver is reportedly dealing with plantar fasciitis.

Pittman will likely have to manage it from week to week, and if he has to sit a while, he can at least use the time to study a few more signals.