2025 NFL Discussion

[JosephC]

James Pearce couldn't stay on the rails for 1 year after being drafted.  Looks like all those pre-draft rumors of him being "unstable" were true.

[LouisEly]

Saw a tweet/X this morning that said that Seattle lost the least amount of salary $ to IR of any team in the NFL this past season.

[Fear The Chorizo]

2 hours ago, LouisEly said:

Saw a tweet/X this morning that said that Seattle lost the least amount of salary $ to IR of any team in the NFL this past season.

Yep - in today's NFL, maintaining roster depth to o ercome significant injuries is a mirage...to win a Super Bowl without the unquestioned best qb in the league (Mahomes), you need to be among the best 10 teams in the league going into the season, then get lucky with health and schedule quirks.

[HarryDoyle]

The Browns doing Browns things. 

 

[adambr2]

John Schneider to me is the one that got away for us.

He makes the tough decisions that our organization doesn’t have the guts to pull the trigger on.

Traded Russell Wilson at the exact right time. Nailed the picks. Wasn’t afraid to move on from a HOF coach when he realized it wasn’t working anymore. Wasn’t afraid to trade Geno.

Our organization would have been operating under a different direction and philosophy the last 15-20 years if Schneider was running the show, and I’m convinced we’d have multiple championships to show for it.

Schneider knew when it was time to break up the good old boys. We just extended ours.

[SeaBass]

15 hours ago, adambr2 said:

John Schneider to me is the one that got away for us.

He makes the tough decisions that our organization doesn’t have the guts to pull the trigger on.

Traded Russell Wilson at the exact right time. Nailed the picks. Wasn’t afraid to move on from a HOF coach when he realized it wasn’t working anymore. Wasn’t afraid to trade Geno.

Our organization would have been operating under a different direction and philosophy the last 15-20 years if Schneider was running the show, and I’m convinced we’d have multiple championships to show for it.

Schneider knew when it was time to break up the good old boys. We just extended ours.

Sure but was he ever going to realistically be named GM in Green Bay in 2010 before accepting that same job in Seattle? Ted Thompson won a Super Bowl that year.

This post is basically saying, "John Schneider sure is a good GM, I like him." Which is fine I suppose but I don't really think there's any relevance in there whatsoever to the Green Bay Packers in 2026.

[LouisEly]

17 hours ago, adambr2 said:

Traded Russell Wilson at the exact right time.

This is all well and good, but Wilson won exactly zero MVPs in his career, much less one the year before he was traded.

And didn't GB move on from two HOF QBs they had by drafting QBs late in the 1st round and trading those HOF QBs before those HOF QBs were past their prime?  What's the difference between nailing their replacement in the draft and trading them?

[Fear The Chorizo]

18 hours ago, adambr2 said:

John Schneider to me is the one that got away for us.

He makes the tough decisions that our organization doesn’t have the guts to pull the trigger on.

Traded Russell Wilson at the exact right time. Nailed the picks. Wasn’t afraid to move on from a HOF coach when he realized it wasn’t working anymore. Wasn’t afraid to trade Geno.

Our organization would have been operating under a different direction and philosophy the last 15-20 years if Schneider was running the show, and I’m convinced we’d have multiple championships to show for it.

Schneider knew when it was time to break up the good old boys. We just extended ours.

The Packers would've had to fire their GM who picked Rodgers, navigated a pretty solid qb transition from Favre to rodgers, and appeared to have a loaded young roster after the 2009 season ( they won the next year's super bowl ) to retain Schneider as GM.

 

Hindsight can be 20/20, but that take off being bummed Schneider isnt the Packers' GM now is pretty unrealistic.  Maybe they could have tried to pry him away from Seattle instead of hiring Gute after Thompson aged out of his role in early 2018, but definitely not when he first got a GM gig.

[SeaBass]

19 hours ago, adambr2 said:

Wasn’t afraid to move on from a HOF coach when he realized it wasn’t working anymore.

John Schneider also didn't make the decision to fire Pete Carroll (though I'm sure he probably had input on it) but it was the owner that made that call. Carroll was on even footing with Schneider in the organization similar to Green Bay's current power structure with Carroll even having final say on all player personnel moves, roster construction, and talent acquisition.

So maybe the guy you're actually admiring is Pete Carroll (though I doubt that since Schneider is the one that remains).

[adambr2]

11 hours ago, LouisEly said:

This is all well and good, but Wilson won exactly zero MVPs in his career, much less one the year before he was traded.

And didn't GB move on from two HOF QBs they had by drafting QBs late in the 1st round and trading those HOF QBs before those HOF QBs were past their prime?  What's the difference between nailing their replacement in the draft and trading them?

Exactly ! Wilson was less decorated than Rodgers. We could have gotten even more for Rodgers than the Seahawks got for Wilson, presumably.

Yes, it’s true that we did end up trading Rodgers, but the hesitation to do it after 2021 cost us a boatload of draft capital when the market would have been enormous for him after 2021.

This is exactly what I was talking about. We always make the safe, easy decision. The Seahawks took a big chance. It paid off for them last week.

This isn’t a “hindsight is 20/20” moment for me. I was begging the Packers to pull the trigger with Denver after 2021 for what they were offering. And Gute couldn’t do it. Because we don’t take risks. We run it back. Except not entirely, we try to run it back except by replacing Davante Adams with Sammy Watkins. Which, any idiot could have told the Packers, wasn’t going to be the same situation, Rodgers wasn’t going to be the same without Adams.

I don’t buy the cliche argument of “oh, come on now, you can’t trade Rodgers coming off an MVP year where you lost in the NFC Championship game.”

Yes, you absolutely can. It’s actually the perfect time to do it, because he’s 38 and you know the end is coming and yet his value will never be higher. You absolutely can if you think the guy you took in the 1st round to succeed him who has sat for 2 years behind him is your guy.

But we didn’t. We gave that all up for one more year of running it back. Because that was the safe, understandable play. And that was kind of my whole point to begin with. 

[adambr2]

TLDR; the Packers bungling of the 2022 offseason was Gute’s worst performance as a GM. 

He had two clear paths: run it back with Rodgers and Adams in 2022 and put every available resource into winning a Super Bowl in 2022-23, or trade both Rodgers and Adams for a mammoth haul, take your lumps with Love in 2022 and find out if he is the future.

He chose to ride it out somewhere in the middle, which neither helped us then nor is it helping us now.

[JosephC]

I'd consider myself neutral on Gutekunst.  Hard for me to criticize him at all for the 2022 off-season.  He pulled Zach Tom, Rasheed Walker, Romeo Doubs, Quay Walker, Christian Watson, Devonte Wyatt, Sean Rhyan and Kingsley Enagbare all out of one draft, which is pretty remarkable.

Sammy Watkins had 815 receiving yards in the two previous seasons combined, and signed a smaller type contract that could have been worth up to 4 million if he hit all of the incentives.  There was no way anybody viewed him as a replacement for Adams.  He was just there to give more depth to a group that included Lazard, Cobb and the rookies Watson and Doubs.

Looking back at the transactions list, it appears the only other "notable" free agent signing that year was Jarran Reed, who was a cheap, one-year bandage type signing who came in and did the job he was paid to do.  He played in 68.25% of the team's defensive snaps, the second highest total for a defensive lineman, only behind Kenny Clark.

Keisean Nixon was a scrap-heap signing that off-season, an excellent find for a minimal investment.

I'd argue that the biggest blunder that off-season was trading away Cole Van Lanen for basically nothing.  But even that is a very, very shaky criticism as Van Lanen hadn't shown much here and then rode the bench for 3 years with his new team prior to having a breakout season.

And the Packers were never going to get for Rodgers what the Seahawks got for Wilson.  When Rodgers was traded, he was heading into his age 40 season.  If he would have been traded a year earlier, he would have been heading into his age 39 season.  At that age, most teams figure the guy only has 1 or 2 good years left in him.  When Wilson was traded, he was heading into his age 34 season.  When the Broncos picked him up, he immediately got a new 5-year contract and they saw him as being the team's starter for the next half-decade...something that wasn't going to happen for a team trading for Rodgers.

[LouisEly]

13 hours ago, adambr2 said:

I don’t buy the cliche argument of “oh, come on now, you can’t trade Rodgers coming off an MVP year where you lost in the NFC Championship game.”

Yes, you absolutely can

Yes, you absolutely can.

And you would have had a conniption and said that they aren't trying to win.

Easy to judge something after the fact once the results are in.

[nate82]

As a Bears fan I was happy when the Packers didn’t trade Rodgers.  That would have been a massive haul of draft picks from Denver.  I think Denver at the time was willing to trade for both Adams and Rodgers.  

[adambr2]

1 hour ago, LouisEly said:

Yes, you absolutely can.

And you would have had a conniption and said that they aren't trying to win.

Easy to judge something after the fact once the results are in.

Didn’t read the part where I said I was begging us *at that time* to make the trade, did you?

Don’t tell me how I would have reacted when I literally have posting history to back up how I felt about it at the time.

Actually, I was on record at them time saying I didn’t think there was any way we would get 3 firsts for a 38 year old quarterback. After the Russell Wilson trade, I think I was wrong about that. You think I would have had a “conniption” about getting a return that I said at the time would have been a pipe dream?

[adambr2]

21 minutes ago, nate82 said:

As a Bears fan I was happy when the Packers didn’t trade Rodgers.  That would have been a massive haul of draft picks from Denver.  I think Denver at the time was willing to trade for both Adams and Rodgers.  

It was the same way I felt when Carolina blew their wad to trade up and get the #1 from the Bears. Not very happy.