2020 Packers Draft
Making Sense of the First Round Pick
The Green Bay Packers were 13-3 last year, in the NFC Championship, have a 36 year old future HOF QB, an obvious need in upgrading it’s offensive skill positions (the common folk take, not mine), and held the 30th pick in the 2020 NFL Draft which was considered to be one of the deepest WR drafts in recent memory. As the first round wound down, there were 6 WR’s already taken, and the Packers traded up to #26 (giving up a 4th rounder this year), and selected QB Jordan Love from Utah State. Didn’t fact check this, but saw something on Twitter that it was 15 years to the day that Rodgers was selected to become Favre’s heir apparent, continuing a long list of similarities between the 2 greatest QB’s of all time.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of Packer fans and anti-Packer fans (vile people that typically are fans of other teams such as the Bears or Bengals, and who really know what the hell they’re talking about considering their franchises have so many Super Bowl rings) alike are ripping the pick and think it’s the dumbest decision made to date in the draft. Well, to avoid me losing my mind, I’m going to address the most common takes as to why people seem to hate the pick, and help you sleep better at night as a result.
Take #1:
Last year the Packers were 13-3, in the NFC title game, and were 1 or 2 >players away from winning the Super Bowl….
Anyone who thinks a team is ever one or two players away from winning a Super Bowl is not intelligent. So it is not surprising that this initial take is coming from again, the Bear and Bengal fans who have had so much success in their storied franchises’ histories and think they have any idea what the hell they’re talking about – in case that isn’t clear, I think you are a moron if you are hating on the pick for this reason.
I am 100% confident my 7 year old nephew could come up with that analysis, so good job really using your brain to evaluate everything that goes into this selection – maybe that’s why the Bengals have lost in the Wild Card round to the Texans like 9 years in a row before succumbing to just being a waste of time and winning all of 2 games last year. How fucking embarrassing is that – like you have all these draft people and front office people, and the biggest decision you need to make in the offseason literally required 0 time or effort. They could have had Mel Kiper make the pick or left it up to the fans in the world to vote, and Joe Burrow would still have been selected. The Bears can just go straight to hell – you’re sitting there with a QB you traded up for when Mahomes (yes, the reigning MVP) and Deshaun Watson were both available – not to mention you haven’t won a Super Bowl since 1985 and prance around acting like you can be in the same breath of a conversation with the Packers as far as storied franchises. Go to hell Chicago, the only thing you’re good for is that you have gone like 16-4 vs the Packers the last 20 meetings, so keep up the good work in handing us 2 free wins a year.
Back to the Point
Ok, coming back from my tangent on hate of people who think they have any room to talk when they are fans of the most embarrassing franchises in sports, I think you need to evaluate what the Packers were thinking sitting at their initial pick of number 30. Would they have liked to add an impact player to a team that was 2 wins away from a Super Bowl? Of course. Does it make sense to take a well-recognized name at 30 just so you can say, “we got a good athlete who had good production in college and most everyone has heard of his name, so we can cross off adding to the team/giving Rodgers another weapon”? HELL NO. You do not draft on need, you draft on value – and while I do not like trading up for this pick, at the end of the day, we got a top 10 talent at pick 26 when we have a QB who is 36 (37 in December), haven’t ever really had a viable backup option which has led to the past 15 years of allocating a lot of time and resources on back up QB competitions only for them to completely fail when pressed into a game, and now ideally can avoid needing to suck ass like the Bengals did in order to get a top 10 pick in the future to mindlessly take a premier QB prospect. Another way to think about this is, would you trade the 30th pick and a 4th rounder this year, for the 26th pick this year and the avoidance of using a top 10 pick in 3 years? That sounds at the very least like a reasonable trade off.
Take #2:
Seems like the Rodger’s era is over… (just when I thought you couldn’t get any >dumber, you go and say something like that) and/or we wasted the closing window with >Rodgers (somewhat more intelligent)
Rodgers has said he wants to play until 40 (so 3 more years or so). The organization has said they are on board with that and would also like that to happen. Gutekunst even explicitly said right after the 1st round in his press conference “We have the best QB in the league, and we plan to have him for awhile”. Taking a QB in the first round with very high upside but clearly work to be done does not mean the best QB in the league is on his way out. But being 36+ in the NFL is no joke, and not exactly a certainty that can be relied on to play 16+ games a year (i.e. injury or declining play coming faster than expected). The other side to this is that we wasted Rodgers window. So, let’s say Rodgers wins the MVP the next 3 years and Jordan Love starts to say I want to play or trade me. THIS IS A GOOD SITUATION TO HAVE.
Obviously I’m using an extreme situation, but my point is, if we look back and are thinking wow Rodgers really did end up playing well for another 4 years when we took Love, and maybe we should have used the pick on a “play now” prospect, that would be a very very good situation. Shit trade the guy for more draft capital than his 26th overall and 4th round initial investment cost. The only negative is that we wouldn’t have taken a potential “impact” player now. However, clearly the Packers – based on extensive scouting that their full time team of people did for a year, and not a few punkass bloggers that read a few mock drafts – did not feel there was a 1st round grade or much more upside on the available prospects than they see being available in the 2nd round and/or later.
At a very minimum, Rodgers is playing this next year. Anyone who has followed the NFL for any extended period of time knows that there is literally nothing that you can be certain off even week to week, let alone in a year from now regarding a 36+ year old quarterback. The Packers do not plan to be caught with their dicks in their hands if Rodgers for some reason wouldn’t play next year or even the year after. We will leave that to the Bengals and Bears since they seem so good at it.
Take 3:
Jordan Love played like shit last year and doesn’t even warrant a 1st round >pick.
He threw a lot of interceptions, that’s never good, but no one is asking him to play year 1 and hopefully not in year 2 or 3 – so the clear plan is for him to have plenty of time to work on things such as his decision making. Also, he dealt with a new coaching staff and a lot of non-returning players from 2018-2019 so a better evaluation is looking at his 2018 numbers. From an athletic standpoint, he’s the most talented passer in the draft (yes, even more so than Joe Burrow, and I’ve already wagered $1,000 that Love will have more rings than Burrow at the end of their careers).
The athletic profile for Jordan Love alone makes him a top 10 prospect in any draft, so don’t even try to say it was a reach of a pick based on upside/potential. My comparable is he’s a bigger Patrick Mahomes actually. Oh, and all this talk about his interceptions? Well the last FBS QB to be taken in the first round after leading his league in INT’s? One Dan Marino.
I could keep going on about idiotic takes that are made to make this pick look bad, but let me just put the main points I want to emphasize/re-emphasize here in the closing of this since I’m going on 2,000 words and spent about 3 hours bitching at people last night over the same shit.
• Taking a QB in the 1st round and a WR in the 4th round (ideally a Quintez Cephus like) makes people lose their minds, but if we took a WR at 1 and a QB at 4, they’d be more comfortable because it addresses the “need” aspect of the draft more adequately in the plebeian’s mind.
• This is not Madden. This is not a fantasy draft. Because we didn’t draft somebody that you can go and get a new cool jersey of in the 1st round does not mean this was a bad pick. There is a level of value associated with every player – so why would the Packers take a guy at 30 overall that they see as having the same value as what they can get in the 2nd or later rounds?
• Rodgers window is not over… ideally, he still plays his 3-4 years, both from his standpoint, and the Organization’s
• At a minimum he is playing 1, most likely 2 without any real controversy. Rodgers is in 0 danger of getting beat out anytime soon. But again, the NFL is one of the most unknown sport leagues in the world week by week and obviously even more so year to year. Especially during a pandemic.
• Yes I wanted to draft a non-QB in the first round as well, but I fully trust Gutekunst to add plenty of value in the rest of the draft, and also outside of the draft (WHERE HE HAS BEEN HEAD AND SHOULDERS ABOVE EVERY OTHER GM IN THE NFL – and not just trades, but street FA guys)
• I know it’s hard to not have a well-recognized name like a CeeDee Lamb especially with all the hype leading up to the draft, but if you want to draft that way, go be a Cowboys fan and enjoy never having even been to an NFC Championship game in over 20 years let alone a Super Bowl
In Closing
Finally, things always go back to, have you gotten better than your divisional opponents in the offseason?
The Vikings let their top 2 CB’s go, traded away their top WR, drafted the 2nd coming of Treadwell (a 1st round bust of theirs 4 years ago or so) in round 1 with the pick they got in the trade, and then took some other no talent assclown with their other 1st round pick. The Bears…. They didn’t pick in the first round because they whored themselves out to be able to waste Khalil Mack’s career, signed our old TE Jimmy Graham who we cut, and traded for another QB to compete with their 2nd overall pick of a QB who can’t throw left. The Lions, well they are the Lions, and apparently have a head coach who is a closet sociopath and alienates his players in team meetings. Point is, the NFC North is all but locked up already, so chill the hell out.