The Green Bay Packers are navigating uncharted waters in their quest for sustained success. In five of the last six years, the team has found itself in the upper tier of spending. But they have plummeted to the bottom of the ranking — with a particularly inexpensive approach to the offensive roster.
The Packers were in the top half of the league in cash spending in five of the last six years, unsuccessfully trying to win another Super Bowl ring in Aaron Rodgers’ twilight years. Now that they’ve traded the future Hall of Famer to the New York Jets, the franchise has reverted back to a conservative financial approach.
The Packers are scheduled to spend $204.74 million on their roster in 2023. They are 31st in the league, just ahead of the Los Angeles Rams, who actively traded away star and role players to clean the cap sheet. On offense, Green Bay’s new approach is even more pronounced. It’s the most inexpensive offense in the league at $79.19 million.
No other team is spending less than $84 million, and just four other teams are under $100 million — the Indianapolis Colts, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, New England Patriots, and Tennessee Titans. It’s also the cheapest receiving group, combining wide receivers and tight ends.
Historically, the Packers have managed the cap conservatively. Andrew Brandt, who preceded Russ Ball as the team’s vice president of player finance, has written that avoiding future dead money was a priority when he managed the team’s cap.
“Personally, I managed the cap differently,” Brandt wrote. “With a ‘pay as you go’ approach that favored a smoothing approach to cap. Some teams do operate that way, but most are playing the future proration game.”
COVID-19 and the drop in salary cap that resulted from it forced the Packers to change this dynamic in 2020. Since then, “restructure,” “conversion,” “void years,” and “dead money” have been frequent words in Packers fans’ vocabularies.
“With the way we’re doing things lately,” Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst told reporters half-jokingly, “we’ll probably restructure everybody and try to keep making some room.”
The Packers still didn’t have many options this year. They restructured almost every possible veteran contract to have enough cap room to operate. But Gutekunst and Ball pumped the brakes on extra spending.
On offense, the Packers haven’t added any players via free agency. The only additions were draft picks, undrafted free agents, and future deals signed immediately after last season. Besides trading Aaron Rodgers, the team let Allen Lazard, Randall Cobb, Robert Tonyan, and Marcedes Lewis go. With so many young players, the idea is to clean the cap situation and see who might be part of the future by letting them play alongside each other.
“That’s a little bit of the idea,” Gutekunst said during the draft. “I think it’s important for those guys to grow together.”
The defense isn’t that expensive either, and the splashiest move by the Packers in the offseason was re-signing slot cornerback and kick returner Keisean Nixon for one year.
Future situation
The Packers currently are 13th in cap space at $14.3 million. But there’s little flexibility because they have already adjusted most available deals to create space.
Right now, the biggest ways to open up more cap room are extending Rashan Gary ($3-4 million) or restructuring Yosh Nijman ($2.6 million) and Jon Runyan ($1.4 million). Without more spending, the situation gets better starting next year. They are projected to have $20.7 million in cap space for 2024, while eight teams are already over the cap. The 2025 space is projected to be $121.1 million, a clean slate before potential extensions that are to come.
Different ways of spending
The fact that the current version of the Packers’ offense is inexpensive doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. While the team hasn’t invested much money per se, there is a lot of draft capital invested in the roster. Over the last two years, Green Bay has drafted six wide receivers, two tight ends, three offensive linemen, and one running back, including three top-50 picks in receiving weapons — Christian Watson last offseason and Luke Musgrave and Jayden Reed this year.
It’s an evaluation season, and what the young players are able to do will determine which ones will receive big money moving forward.
