Aaron Rodgers' ESPN ban lasted a full day

• Aaron Rodgers is back on Pat McAfee's ESPN show.
• That was fast — on Wednesday we heard he wasn't going to be on ESPN for the rest of the NFL season.
• Bob Iger doesn't need any more headaches, so Rodgers will have to stick to sports. Will he?

Remember when the Aaron Rodgers/Pat McAfee/Jimmy Kimmel situation was resolved because Rodgers was no longer going to be on ESPN?

That was Wednesday.

Thursday, the NFL quarterback was back on McAfee's ESPN show, commenting on Patriots coach Bill Belichick's departure. He apparently did not weigh in on his feud with ABC star Jimmy Kimmel, which had caused a commotion in and outside Disney, which owns both ABC and ESPN.

That's a surprising turn of events given that Wednesday, McAfee announced that Rodgers was done appearing on his show for the remainder of the NFL season, and people inside ESPN were unclear about when or if Rodgers would return.

But it also illustrates the unique relationship that McAfee, a former NFL punter, has with ESPN: ESPN is paying McAfee a ton of money to be one of the key faces of the network — a reported $85 million over 5 years — but McAfee doesn't really work for ESPN: He produces his own talk show and licenses it to ESPN, which means he has an enormous amount of control over what does and doesn't appear on the show.

Wednesday, it appeared that McAfee had found the limits of his control: While both he and Disney executives said the decision to have Rodgers stop appearing on his show was McAfee's call, people in and around the company believed Disney had made it clear to McAfee that they very much wanted Rodgers to stop fighting with Kimmel, which was causing a headache Disney CEO Bob Iger really didn't need.

So McAfee's announcement that Rodgers' appearances were done for the season appeared to solve that problem.

So what has happened since? ESPN declined to comment, but my understanding is that the company believes that it's fine for Rodgers to appear on McAfee's show after all, as long as he sticks to sports.

Which kind of makes sense? Again, ESPN has invested an enormous amount in McAfee, and one of McAfee's key selling points is that he's the place where superstar Rodgers goes to unload. (McAfee, by the way, also pays Rodgers to do that.)

And Wednesday, after making his announcement, McAfee took to Twitter/X to tell people that actually there was no news here and that there was nothing to see and that Rodgers might actually show up again after all: "He'll make random surprise welcomed pop-ins during big events or offseason adventures but, it's always been a season thing. I never said he'll never be on the show again. I hope he chooses to still chat with us," McAfee wrote.

And now he's back, in an appearance McAfee clearly delighted in:

There's more than a little bit of a what-the-definition-of-is-is word parsing here regarding what McAfee said on TV about Rodgers, what he actually meant, and what Disney believed he had agreed to do. But that doesn't really matter.

What matters, for now: Disney is letting one of its biggest stars control who appears on his show — power that's basically unheard of in Big Time TV.

And for a day, at least, that's working out for McAfee and Disney, since Rodgers didn't use his TV time to attack another Disney star.

The unanswered question: What happens if Rodgers — or anyone else McAfee books — causes problems for Disney again? We've got years to find out.