The Green Bay Packers are a young team overall. There aren’t many established veterans on the team, except for maybe Kenny Clark, Preston Smith, Aaron Jones, and David Bakhtiari. With age comes wisdom. But for players like Bakhtiari, it may also signal the end of his time in Green Bay. If 2023 was Bakhtiari’s final season with the Packers, it would be bittersweet to see him go. He had a good run in Green Bay, but certain factors show he is on the back end of his career. Ending his contract early will undoubtedly help the Packers financially. Still, Green Bay will miss his talent and his presence.
David Bakhtiari just finished his 11th season with the Packers, and he’s 32 years old. He’s entering the final year of the contract extension he signed in 2020. The main question is not whether Bakhtiari wants to remain in Green Bay but whether the Packers want him back for that final season.
There are reasons to question Bakhtiari’s productivity for the upcoming season. He tore his ACL during practice before Green Bay’s Week 17 matchup with the Bears of the 2020 season and only played one game in 2021, entering as a reserve in the 37-30 loss to the Detroit Lions in Week 18. Two weeks later, he was inactive for Green Bay’s Divisional Round matchup against the San Francisco 49ers.
In 2022, Bakhtiari missed only six games during the regular season. That may seem like a lot at first. However, offensive linemen usually miss a few games each year due to the physical demands of their position. Therefore, it makes sense for him to miss a handful during a season now that he’s on the wrong side of 30.
Last year, he played in only one game for the entire season, Green Bay’s 38-20 beatdown of the Chicago Bears. After that game, the Packers put him on injured reserve due to another surgery on his recovering knee. That was his fifth surgery on that knee since he tore it:
Bakhtiari has only played 13 games in the past three seasons. He will turn 33 at the start of next season, and the final year of his contract gave him a massive $40 million cap hit.
The Packers have restructured Bakhtiari’s contract since he initially signed a four-year, $92 million deal in 2020. If Green Bay cuts him, they will still owe him the $20 million of guaranteed money, but it will save them another $19 million to $20 million they could use in free agency.
However, the main problem with cutting David Bakhtiari is losing David Bakhtiarti. The NFL is a business, and teams eventually must move on from players. But you want to keep franchise players around as long as possible. Fans adore Bakhtiari because of his personality and off-the-field presence.
Think back to when he was chugging beers at Milwaukee Bucks games with Aaron Rodgers.
He’s just one of those guys who wants to play hard, drink beer, and have a good time. That’s all that a Wisconsin football fan needs to fall in love with a player, especially for a player with Bakhtiari’s talent. Losing someone like him would be detrimental not only to the locker room but also to the fanbase.
Rasheed Walker stepped up and played well with Bakhtiari on injured reserve for 16 games this past season. Walker surrendered only five sacks and 29 pressures on 447 pass plays. That adds up to surrendering a pressure or a sack on only 7.6% of all pass plays or giving them up once every 13.15 pass plays.
If the Packers don’t cut or trade Bakhtiari this offseason, Green Bay will get its best offensive lineman back for one more year. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially since the line is one of the offense’s greatest strengths. They want to have it at full power for this upcoming season. Gutekunst would take the $40 million cap hit, and Bakhtiari would put in one more season of productive pass protection.
The only issue is that if he gets hurt again, Green Bay will have used $40 million of cap space on a player who has not played meaningfully in two-straight seasons and three of the last four.
Green Bay’s offensive line as a unit will not suffer too much from Bakhtairi’s departure, but they will greatly miss his personality. This is why his eventual departure is difficult for fans. From a logical standpoint, it makes perfect sense to let him go and use cap space on someone else. But from an emotional perspective, it would be difficult to see him go because he is a fun person to watch off the field, and the fanbase loves him.
