Point Beer Is Best

They aren't the only team that has refused to give up a home game. I believe the Steelers made a claim that their lease requires that they hold 10 home games (2 preseason & 8 regular season) which conveniently gave them a legal excuse for not having to give up a home game. The added quirk for the Packers is that the teams that are otherwise willing to give up a home game to play overseas have so far refused to give up a home game against the Packers due to their own economic impact. Packers fans travel well. It's pretty much a guarantee that a game featuring the Packers is going to be a sellout so there is no motivation for those teams to play the Packers anywhere other than their home stadium.

[sarcasm]I've heard several rumors that he's a total malcontent, and is actually only 4'11" and 187 lbs so there is no way anyone with the first 11 picks should draft him.[/sarcasm] C'mon people, let's get these rumors trending! A line with Daniels/Clark/Oliver would be amazing.

They are hosting Jonah Williams as a G/T prospect. Despite signing Billy Turner to essentially be your starting RG (projected line would be Bak/Lane/Linsley/Turner/Bulaga which is pretty damn good), the OL is still a high priority given that Bulaga is entering his final year and has had availability concerns due to injuries. Williams (or another prospect) is then there to provide depth at G/T in '19 and take over at RT in '20. Plus with Cole Madison returning, they've also got a guy who can back up G/C and push Lane for playing time if he falters. Even with taking Williams, however, they still lack a guy who can play LT which is obviously concerning and needs to be addressed also.

The Packers are hosting QB Drew Lock (a potential top-ten pick) tomorrow, and also had interest in hosting QB Daniel Jones (another potential first rounder) but couldn't line it up. I can't see them pulling the trigger, and hoping this is a Jedi move where Gutey gets a QB-needy team to jump up in front of them to push the position players down to him. Almost zero chance they take a QB in the top half of round 1 after giving out a record contract to Rodgers one year ago.

In terms of drafting a QB, one strategy may be to trade pick 44 this year for someone's #1 next year, then use those two #1's next year to have enough ammo to get in range for a QB you'd like. A guy like Rodgers falling to is something we'll likely never see again.

Fixed it for you Price of Netflix is going up, too. Probably in preparation for losing all Disney content soon. $9 is the increased price from $8 for long timers. It isn't $15 across the board unless you have 4k/multiple screens. The Disney service is going to cheap too. Rumor is $5-8. Disney+ is being released in November (I think the 12th). The info that was released yesterday indicated it would be $69.99 for an annual subscription or $6.99 on a monthly basis. That's pretty decent and in-line with the streaming services that don't offer actual TV channels yet have original content like Netflix. Now, if they would just bring back The Punisher on Disney+ I would be very happy.

The type of spending people are advocating for is not buying an asset (a car). At least an asset has a multi-year use and is collateral against the loan. They are talking about using the unrealized gain in their homes (even if they have to take out a loan to cover it) and then hiring a maid or a gardener (operating expense).

To reiterate what many others have said, the value of a company increasing is an unrealized gain. That means nothing in terms of cash available to increase payroll. Does it give the owner some leverage if they want to increase debt to finance a project? Yes. And as any good business would do, they would make that decision if they decided the return on investment made sense (like the Maryvale project). Could they also leverage themselves to increase payroll for a short amount of time? Unlikely because you'd be asking a lender to fund an operating expense (payroll) - NOT a capital investment with an expected ROI. Those are bad business decisions and may not even be possible. Operating Profit/Income is the part of your income statement prior to subtracting Interest Expense (cost of borrowing money) and Income Taxes (someone else already pointed this out). Operating Profit less Interest & Taxes = Net Income/(Loss). But not all cash outlays are recognized in the fiscal year they are spent. As some of you pointed out, they spent several millions of dollars on a capital (that's a key word here) project with Maryvale. They undoubtedly financed a decent part of that. But that cash outlay is recognized through depreciation expense over the useful life (could be 10, 15 or 20 years) - not all in year 1. So the Maryvale project had a pretty minimal impact in terms of what Operating Income was reported for 2018, but a very substantial impact on the available cash and the debt-to-equity ratio for the team if they financed a large portion of the improvements. In the end, most of the dollar amounts being thrown around here are pure speculation. But a lot of bad conclusions are being drawn based on misunderstanding of how to interpret financial information. And the biggest myth that keeps getting repeated is that the increase in franchise value must mean they have the financial means to support a huge payroll, even if it means taking on debt to support it.

It’s just the Discovery Network channels (Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network, TLC, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Travel Channel, and MotorTrend) as well as OWN. None of which we watch.

Well we just got notified that YouTubeTV is going up in price. Currently at $39.99 but is going up $10 for everyone and an extra $5 for those of us using AppleTV. $54.99/mo is not that great of a price. [sarcasm]But hey, now we’re going to get Discovery and HGTV so it all evens out in the end.[/sarcasm]

I think with Jennings there's two things going on there in terms of fan perception. One, he took the "Ryan Longwell" approach to his departure which was to take a verbal dump on the city of Green Bay and why Minneapolis was much better. That's obviously going to rub people the wrong way. Secondly, there's such a hypocrisy when Jennings calls Rodgers overly sensitive. It comes off as "Rodgers is so overly sensitive and needs to let things go AND ALSO CAN YOU BELIEVE THE MEAN JOKE HE TOLD TO CARLOS ROGERS 7 YEARS AGO? I KNEW I WAS DONE IN GB AFTER THAT." And then does nothing but tell the same stories for years after that. The narrative is that Rodgers is so sensitive, and it's usually the same two has-beens (Finley & Jennings) banging that drum, while Rodgers has remained mostly silent on the issue up until his interview response released last night. He finally went scorched-earth on Finley and Jennings, and it was long overdue: "If it’s not an article about me, do you ever hear their names anywhere else? … You talk about me being sensitive and petty, at what point do you move on or stop telling the same stories?"

Minor leaguers need union protection. Unless they are a "bonus baby", they aren't making a living wage. For me, ultimately everything comes back to finding an equitable solution to revenue sharing and the issue with local TV contracts and the inequity they create. But you start with symptom of that issue first - the enormous wage gap issue. Pre-free agency players make peanuts in comparison to their actual worth in varying degrees (whether they are a role player or a major star), and then you have a class of aging stars making way more than they are worth. It's cliche... but there isn't really a middle class. So, the first obvious comment on that is there should be something done to raise the floor/minimum while placing an overall cap to suppress player salaries at the top (not suppressing player salaries in total - that should stay constant - you just wouldn't have as many players signed to these mega-deals as payroll is reallocated to younger players). But if you put in place a salary cap (which you could argue the Luxury tax already functions in place of this) while simultaneously mandating that salary minimums need to rise substantially, that now creates an extremely troublesome situation for teams who cannot support large payrolls. Their entire competitive model is based on acquiring young (i.e. "cheap") controllable talent, and then trade those assets for more controllable talent before they become too expensive. So now you have several teams who cannot afford to be competitive. So how do you maintain competitive balance? You have to have revenue shared equally between all teams. This is easily accomplished in the NFL because their TV contracts are handled at the national level by the league. In the MLB where you have regional sports networks, where the subscribers are paying to see only their regional team, well I don't see an obvious solution which is where my rampant incoherent paragraph ends! The issues with MLB are institutional. You have to get the owners of the major-market teams to agree that for the betterment of the sport, they have to be willing to share their TV revenues equally which will place their competition on equal footing. I just don't know how you convince those owners to essentially be willing to not extract the maximum value out of their assets (TV contracts) in order to make their own competition better. Any resolution between MLB and the MLBPA is likely to be a band-aid treating the symptom of the issue with the sport, and not treating the root cause.

Whoever we get in return in a Corey Ray trade. I'd like to keep him, but he's probably our best trade chip at this point who isn't untouchable.

Don't toy with my emotions like this.

My opinion - the thought of releasing Bulaga is absolute insanity at this point. Do you need to draft a replacement in the early rounds this year? Absolutely. But considering what other tackles are getting in free agency, and looking at what Bulaga is making (taking his elite performance into consideration against his availability issues), and he's still a steal.

To put this in perspective, Kenny Clark (23) is exactly 11 months older than Sweat (22) yet Clark will be entering his 4th year in the NFL. I really hope the Packers lock up Clark soon. It's a given that they'll at least pick up his 5th year option for the 2020 season, but if he hits FA he'll be entering his age 26 season in 2021. Not many premier talents hit the open market at that age. He's not Aaron Donald, but he's still a top 5 DT.

Please FFS, no. Just find a Howard Green in FA and call it a day. That's not gonna fly in Pettine's defense. You could get by with a Howard Green if you had a good secondary and OLB'ers in Capers D, definitely not in Pettines. He uses his DL to get pressure. Howard Green was a guy who was not terrible for half a season. Building a NYJ like 2016 DL should be the goal. And we could do MUCH worse than grabbing Oliver or a guy like Wilkins at 12. If the Packers are going to have a good defense, they need to be dominant up front. Without a Mack like player, the best way to do that is by being able to rotate 8-9 really good players in that front 5 and put pressure on the QB from every different direction. A front of Clark, Daniels, Wilkerson, Lowry and then an Ed Oliver with the two Smiths, maybe Clay back, Kyler and a Jaylon Ferguson type in the 2nd would give us the potential at a dominant front for a long time. Exactly. Interior DL who can penetrate gives another weapon for Pettine. Daniels is falling off and Clark is going to get expensive so they won't address that need with an expensive free agent acquisition. I feel pretty confident they will draft an interior DL in the first 44 picks if the draft board falls that way, and could still supplement the line either way by bringing back Wilkerson.

I view this as LaFleur doubling down on his commitment to the running game. Lewis is probably one of if not the top blockers in the league. He's a solid receiver who was underutilized in that department by McCarthy. I am getting more and more excited to see what a TE corps of Graham/Lewis/Tonyan and a drafted rookie can do in an innovative offense that plays to their strengths. Not to mention that Lewis had his best work in Nathaniel Hackett's offense in Jacksonville. That being said, from what I've read in terms of scout's opinions, his ability to block fell off last year from his normal standards.

Daniels play slipped a bit last year, plus Clark is going to get paid here in the near future. Would not surprise me to see them target the interior DL position in the 1st round. Makes more economic sense to draft a rookie than to bring back Daniels if they see his play slipping.

I think they will actually have a bit more. It may cost about $10M to sign the rookie class, but since just the top 51 salaries count towards the cap, it may only impact the cap by $3-$4M. Many of the draft picks will be below the top 51, or only incrementally larger and replace the bottom few on the top 51. Other interesting note is that Perry was not released with the Post-June 1st designation, so they are taking his full cap hit in 2019 rather than spreading it out over two years.

Yesterday set the Packers up really well for the draft. Their biggest holes going into the offseason were that they needed two starting EDGE players, two starting safeties, and a starting OG. Well they checked off 4 of those 5 needs. They can truly take BPA or move around as they please to target specific players. With the rumors that they were in on Malik Jackson, and Daniels seemingly on the decline, a guy they might be looking at with their first pick is Ed Oliver. Most mocks I've seen have him going a few picks ahead of us (7-10), so they may have to move up from 12 if he's the guy they covet. Of course Blake Martinez is also in the last year of his rookie deal, and there was some crazy money thrown at ILB so far, so maybe another guy that hasn't been mentioned too much is Devin White.

If you had the budget to sign one, but not both, who is more valuable to the team this year - Kimbrel or Keuchel?

Eric Weddle was cut yesterday as well, but I would prefer they sign someone younger. But Weddle would complement a younger safety (whether it be Collins or a draft pick) well. The need two starting safeties, not just one.

Andy Herman at CheeseheadTV did some excellent film review of Barr. Andy is a must-follow on Twitter (@sconniesports). Is it possible that a team will target Barr as an Edge? Sure, and he will likely be more affordable than the top-tier guys. But as Andy pointed out, his career sack numbers leave something to be desired: In five years, he has 13.5 career sacks which came on 14 plays: * 10 of those sacks he was unblocked or untouched * 2 sacks came by beating a RB one-on-one * 1 sack came when Philip Rivers held the ball to long and walked right back into Barr, who was blocked * 1 sack came after the guard stumbled out of his stance so Barr had a straight shot at the QB That's... not impressive. Basically, he has NEVER beaten an offensive lineman straight-up for a sack. I don't know how often he was asked to blitz as an OLB in a 4-3, however. Andy's full breakdown is here: https://cheeseheadtv.com/blog/film-review-prospective-free-agent-anthony-barr-507

Safety and Edge are the two most glaring holes. Would be nice to address those in Free Agency to take some of the pressure off the "Edge or bust at #12" mentality. Unfortunately most of the Edge players were tagged. Justin Houston seems like he may be a good target, as he was more of a cap casualty than a performance casualty.