There’s a time and a place to go against the grain.
Brian Gutekunst and the Packers have a pretty strong record of organizational offseason tendencies.
Gutekunst loves big, fast receivers (who doesn’t?) and rarely considers players outside specific height/weight/speed parameters. As an organization, the Packers seem fundamentally opposed to taking such players in the first round, though, preferring to mine the later rounds for that kind of prospect. The Packers also love athletes in general — there’s a good reason we spend so much time talking about Relative Athletic Scores in the spring. And along those lines, they have very strongly defined tendencies for their offensive line draft picks, preferring guys that meet pretty stringent guidelines for movement-related athletic testing.
Organizationally, the Packers are pretty conservative. Spending in free agency has never been a huge organizational priority, though Gutekunst does it more than his predecessor, Ted Thompson. You’ll also rarely find the Packers making big, headline-grabbing trades (unless it’s sending guys out of town, like Davante Adams or Aaron Rodgers).
These tendencies have guided the Packers pretty well over the years. There have been times they’ve misfired, but generally following these rules has helped the Packers avoid big, costly mistakes and build a pretty strong foundation year to year.
But all tendencies can and should be broken from time to time. Breaking tendencies might expose you to risks you might not otherwise have encountered, but a calculated risk can have a big payout, too. Here are four situations where the Packers might want to consider breaking their tendencies, both this offseason and in the future.
When a specific opportunity aligns with a specific need
Josh Jacobs was right: the Packers need a wide receiver. Whatever merits this group has, they’re shorthanded now — Christian Watson won’t be available until late in the season, if at all, and both he and Romeo Doubs are in contract years. With Jayden Reed and Dontayvion Wicks both hitting free agency the year after that, the Packers at the very least need to backfill, to say nothing of their short-term problems.
So is this the year the Packers finally take a receiver in the first round?
Maybe, but as with every position, you shouldn’t just take one for a need. If the Packers really do have this organizational tendency — and it may just be a coincidence, who can say for sure — it’d have to be an exceptionally good value for them to break it. But if a high-end receiver is available in the first round, the Packers have a clear need. It’d be worth breaking the tendency if that’s the case, and other similar situations could justify such a decision in the future, too.
When the need actually is that bad
I don’t think the Packers have an enormous, obvious need this offseason — nothing that would be characterized as an emergency or anything.
But if the Packers ever did find themselves in that kind of situation, they absolutely should pull out all the stops to find a solution.
For instance, if the Packers had whiffed on Xavier McKinney in free agency last year, all bets would have been off in the draft or for any other talent acquisition avenue. The safety spot had to get fixed, and they couldn’t just roll into the season with whatever happened to fall their way during the draft. In a situation of real, actual need, the Packers should absolutely be willing to break their tendencies.
When the player really is exceptional
Sometimes, players really do break the mold. And boy, do the Packers have some pretty firm molds. But good players come in all shapes and sizes, and sometimes guidelines can be too limiting to be helpful.
The Packers had a soft organizational limit on defensive back height for decades after their frustration with Terrell Buckley in the early 90s. That limit was so much a part of their DNA that we spent quite a bit of time after the Packers took Jaire Alexander explaining how and why it was worth the risk.
And you know what? They were. Alexander was a very good player for the Packers, however things have turned out now. I don’t think an extra inch of height would have made him any more durable than he’s been to this point. Some guys just get injured, and Alexander appears to be one of those guys.
His height has never held him back, though. He was, at his best, an exceptional player, and one worth making an exception for.
When the differences from normal tendencies aren’t that significant
The Draft, as we’ve all been told, is an inexact science. There are really no hard and fast guidelines on what makes a good player. Anything the Packers have put in place to help them find the best and brightest out there is, at best, an educated guess.
And sometimes, when a guy falls just outside those tendencies, it’s worth remembering that nothing happens if you break your own rules.
Sure, rules are there for a reason, but they’re not going to send you to prison if you draft a guy whose three-cone time is a tenth of a second slower than what you’d prefer. If a guy is good, you can’t get hung up on what he did on one day of testing. If he’s good enough to hit four of five theoretical thresholds, maybe that’s good enough.