The Green Bay Packers have a particular way of doing business. The Ron Wolf model is still strong in Green Bay, and deservedly so. That’s why Ted Thompson did things the way he did, and that’s why the search to find his successor was almost entirely made of internal options.
The Packers wanted — and still want — to keep their philosophical structure in place, and even though Brian Gutekunst has shown some evolution in comparison to his predecessor, the basic aspects of his team-building strategy are similar. In general, that’s okay. Green Bay has been one of the most stable and consistent winners in the NFL, even if the team has won “just” two Super Bowls in the last 30 years. I put “just” in quotes because winning two Super Bowls is not nearly as easy as it might seem.
However, that doesn’t mean a front office can’t bring in different ideas from other places.
Gutekunst has only made two significant external hires to his personnel department since the Packers promoted him to general manager in 2018. The biggest one was director of football operations Milt Hendrickson, a former national scout for the Baltimore Ravens. The other is assistant director of college scouting Patrick Moore, a former scout for the Cleveland Browns. Those are two important members of the staff, but none of them has experience as a high-level executive who worked close to the top of a staff. And adding big brains to the staff with a strong résumé is always a good idea.
Fortunately, former Minnesota Vikings GM Rick Spielman is available.
The end of Spielman’s tenure in Minnesota wasn’t exactly brilliant, but he was a solid executive and a really good scout and decision-maker. The Vikings changed because they needed new voices after so much time and wanted to pair a new head coach with a new general manager. But that doesn’t mean Spielman wasn’t good at his job.
Spielman had a strange one-year stint as the Miami Dolphins’ general manager, then led the Vikings for 15 seasons. In the past decade, he found an impressive amount of talent with that value – Adam Thielen and Danielle Hunter are the best examples. More recently, he was responsible for drafting Justin Jefferson, the 2022 Offensive Player Of the Year. Spielman put in place the base of the 2022 Vikings who won 13 games and the NFC North this season.
He hasn’t landed a job since Minnesota fired him. But after one year away from football, it might be time to give him a call and offer him a senior personnel executive role.
Analyzing other front offices around the league, several well-administered teams add former general managers or high-end personnel executives to support their scouting work and to stabilize their decision-making processes. For example, two former Packers executives who later became general managers are currently working for other teams as senior personnel executives. Former Kansas City Chiefs and Cleveland Browns GM John Dorsey now is under Brad Holmes for the Detroit Lions. And former Oakland Raiders GM Reggie McKenzie works for the Miami Dolphins under Chris Grier.
There are several other examples of former GMs helping out front offices:
- Brian Gaine, the former Houston Texans GM and current Buffalo Bills assistant GM
- Bob Quinn, the former Detroit Lions GM and current consultant for the Cleveland Browns
- Ryan Grigson, the former Indianapolis Colts GM and now Minnesota’s senior VP of player personnel
- Jeff Ireland, the former Miami Dolphins GM and current New Orleans Saints assistant GM
- Ray Farmer, the former Cleveland Browns GM and current Los Angeles Rams senior personnel executive
- Ryan Pace, the former Chicago Bears GM and current Atlanta Falcons senior personnel executive
It’s fair for the Green Bay Packers to follow their typical management model. But it’s always helpful to add different points of view from smart football people. Rick Spielman is exactly that and could be a highly useful tool for the Packers to be a better-run franchise.
Moreover, Spielman has a modern perception of roster-building and uses analytics as part of his decision-making process. In an interview after his firing, Spielman revealed that his analytics team had a list of hits and misses from the previous 15 years and how and why each pick was a success or a failure.
“To give you an example, a left tackle, we had maybe really liked a guy,” Spielman said. “But his arm measurement was less than 33 inches long and he ran a 5.25 or slower 40. Well, (our) analytics (department) said there have been seven guys with those measurements that came in and were drafted in the first three rounds and none of them ended up being starters or being significant players in the league. That would throw a red flag up for me and for us as we went through the decision process.”
That background alone would be enough argument to hire Spielman.
