The Green Bay Packers boast one of the richest traditions in sports. They’re not just an institution in the NFL, they’re a pillar upon which our collective understanding of football is built.
The New York Yankees, the Chicago Cubs, the Boston Bruins, the (ugh) Dallas Cowboys — these are the Elder Gods of American sport, whose history traces back to a time that predates most of the country’s architecture, industry, and even the fundamental formulations of the major political parties. In a relatively young country obsessed with youth and reinvention, these multi-billion-dollar franchises remain one of the vanishingly few bridges to the era of our great-grandparents.
Perhaps more than any of their stately peers, the Packers lean heavily into that tradition. And for good reason. They’re the small-town team named after the local blue-collar workers whose ownership structure still harkens back to a time of small-D democratic collectivism. (That this is also an ironic reminder that socialism used to be a much more populist position among, if not those Packers, at least those packers, is an issue for another article on another website.)
The Green Bay way. It’s both a slogan and an ethos. A phrase spoken with pride, and also occasional a sarcastic edge. Because it’s starting to seem as though the fidelity to tradition that is the core of the Green Bay Packers’ identity is preventing them from being a truly great modern team.
The Packers were founded in 1919, the year the Treaty of Versailles was signed to end World War I. Woodrow Wilson was president. Airplanes had existed for all of 13 years; the jet engine was still nine years away from invention. There were Americans born into slavery who were still in their 50s. At the earliest Packers games in the American Professional Football Association in 1921, it wouldn’t have been terribly improbable for a few Civil War veterans to be scattered among the crowd.
But the Packers’ tradition is about much more than sheer longevity. They’ve played in on the same field since 1957. They were winning championships during Prohibition. They won the first Super Bowl. The trophy is named after their legendary coach. Their biggest stars — Starr, Favre, and Rodgers — are among the marquee names not just in football but American sports. They’ve been in a committed monogamous relationship with only two QBs for the past since the Clinton administration. They draft and develop, damnit!
And what fanbase wouldn’t revel in such history? In relative terms, the Packers are the Roman Coliseum and the Jacksonville Jaguars are a strip-mall E-cigarette store. (That’s sort of unfair, since presumably some customers of the E-cigarette store would be satisfied.) But both the fans and the upper management increasingly seemed not just indebted to that history, but beholden to it. Trapped in a gilded cage, or a Green and Gold one.
It’s evident in so many ways as they tilt, woozily, into 2022. That reluctance to cut ties with the past, to abandon the familiar in favor of the newfangled.
Joe Barry isn’t exactly a long-term resident of the Fox River Valley, but the stubbornly tenured defensive coordinator is indicative of their reluctance to move on from coaches who aren’t a good fit. See also: Green Bay special teams coaches, 2015-2021. In stumbling from Ron Zook to Shawn Mennenga to Maurice Drayton, they kept trying to fix their problems by finding staff in-house — from those very same struggling units.
And the answer to the conundrum turned out to be: Go spend a chunk of change on a flashy coach from another franchise. Former Las Vegas Raiders interim HC Rich Bisaccia has since acquitted himself pretty nicely.
It was Bisaccia who finally pulled the plug on Amari Rodgers, who did so much damage returning punts for the Packers that he might qualify as a second-tier MVP candidate for the Minnesota Vikings. Amari Rodgers was the perfect example of Green Bay’s much heralded draft-and-develop approach gone wrong, where they chased the sunk-cost fallacy after a bad investment at wide receiver who not only never panned out at his intended position but hamstrung them at another. That same borderline obsession with draft-and-develop is one of the reasons they seem eternally hesitant to sign a big-name free agent down the stretch to complement Gutekunst’s savvy under-the-radar acquisitions.
Re-signing kicker Mason Crosby doesn’t exactly signal a team embracing the future. He’s the team’s all-time leading scorer. That’s awesome, and fans should celebrate him for years to come. But Crosby has evolved from going gray himself to giving fans gray hair. Old Spice’s declining leg strength has narrowed his range somewhere down near the same as kids flicking a triangular paper football across a cafeteria table at lunch.
Of course, one of the main reasons you’d bring Crosby back into the fold is that he’s best pals with The Prince of Darkness. And that is a whole other ball of wax, the subject not just for another article but also of so very many articles of late.
But let’s keep it to this finer point: However the Aaron Rodgers conundrum resolves itself, hopefully sooner rather than later, the whole debacle is illustrative of the point. Whether or not the Packers jumped the gun a bit when they spent that 2020 first-round pick on Jordan Love — and they probably did, a little — that was Gutekunst thinking future-forward. The fact that it came back to bite him on the behind, at least in the shorter term, seems to have unfortunately scared him away from moving too boldly forward and humbled him into struggling to keep the team familiar to its aging superstar. It’s a big part of what’s kept them in limbo for the last few years, a long-time good team that can’t quite seem to keep pace with the flashier, more modern great teams.
Green Bay has a proud past. But to move forward into the future, they might need to swallow a little of that pride.
