We are all eating our hats, our words, and a lot of crow. Wonder what Ted Thompson is thinking right now?
My guess is, probably something like "
damn, man, I wish I hadn't died yet!"
As far as "eating crow" is concerned, I am thankful that crow is a lean, low-fat meat, because I am devouring it as though I am one of those fat New York city guys stuffing hot dogs down their throats every summer at that Nathan's ******-eating contest on Coney Island.
I very,
very rarely articulate absolute, unequivocal predictions about anything over which i personally do not have any ability to influence the outcome, but I certainly deviated from that on this one - I adamantly went out on a limb (
several limbs, in fact), to declare that this whole idea was lunacy, and did not at all fit everything we knew about Gutekunst and his team-building model. It was ridiculous, total nonsense.
When I'm wrong, I'm the first one to admit it, and the wronger I am the more clearly I admit that. I obviously could not have been any more wrong.
The only straw to which I can cling is this - the price was actually quite a lot lower than I expected. Original projections were somewhere in the range of two 1st rounders,
plus a 2nd, often even an early Day 3,
plus a player. Or even
2.
Which would have been utter madness; Gutekunst would have had to have bitten by a rabid bat to make that deal.
This deal, though.... this iteration of the deal.... yeah; I can sorta understand it. It's obviously going to change our drafting pattern over the next couple-three years, affect our free-agency strategies (in terms of signing outside free agents as
well as our own), and probably cause us to restructure some contracts that would have been easier had we not done it.
We're gonna lose some guys we would rather have kept. Maybe not many, and maybe not crucial players, but the kind of guys who go into building a deeper, more solid, complete team. They will have earned more money than we can afford to pay them in this new payroll, but other teams will be able to pay them that price now.
Building an elite NFL team is a little like pushing a water balloon. You push in on one part of it, one or two other parts bulge out, and now you have to push back on those. Push too ******* one or two of those, and the balloon bursts. The good GMs (the
truly good ones) seem to be the guys who know just how hard they can afford to push on any one spot, and where they can afford to let other spots bulge outwards; and these next couple of years may be the definitive measure of how truly good Gutekunst is - because he just made his job a lot harder.
There are a lot of personnel decisions coming up over the next couple-few years that are now going to be more difficult than they otherwise would have been; often
much more difficult. That's the price of taking a very, very good team and turning it into a truly elite team.
Can he do it? I think he can. Is he trying to buld a Patriots/Niners/Kansas City dynasty, or a "double down, make it or break it, one or two-year window" team like the recent Rams, Broncos, or Panthers? Because this was a very bold, audacious move. This not the move you would expect from a cautious, patient, "longterm thinkng" sorta guy.
I think that he understands what Green Bay is supposed to be, and he is trying to build a perennial, dynastic team - one that can credibly compete and even threaten almost every single season. And perhaps all the patient, low-key moves he's made over the last have mostly been about putting the pieces in place and preparing for the time when it made sense to strike the big blows - McKiney and Jacobs last summer, and Parsons (the Reggie White analogue) this year. And I think we will soon see.
Gute may be a shrewder, more patient and cautious strategist than most of us realized. Let's sit back and watch it develop.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
