Green Bay Packers general manager Ted Thompson is at the Senior Bowl this week, as are most general managers and scouts.
They talk to and evaluate the players there and sometimes, they also get cornered for interviews. Thompson is pretty notorious for not giving interviews because, you know, “I’m Ted Thompson, how dare you question me!”
But he’s been out in the open this week instead of hiding upstairs at 1265, so what can he do?
First, he talked to Vic Carucci and Adam Caplan on SiriusXM NFL Radio. They asked Thompson if he’d continue his method of team building — draft, re-sign your own guys and ignore everyone else. Thompson indicated that he would.
“We just think it’s a good model to use under the rules of the collective bargaining agreement and that sort of thing,” Thompson said. “We just feel like your best policy is to try as best you can — and it doesn’t always work out because sometimes you have to do different things — but if you draft good people, you develop them, you get a good coaching staff that coaches them up, they like it there, so you try to retain your own players as much as you can and you don’t (always).
“We lose players just like everybody else. But if we can, we like to keep our own and continue adding guys through the draft and through free agency.”
Whoa! What was that last part? Add guys through free agency?
Is there a glimmer of hope that the Packers might actually sign someone worth a shit this year?
Maybe!
The Urinal Sentinel’s Tyler Dunne also got to Thompson and he also asked him about free agency. Here’s that response.
“If an opportunity presents itself and it helps us be better, then yes,” Thompson said. “But I think doing it for the sake of doing it is a waste of time and energy. If we get the opportunity, if it presents itself and makes sense for the club with the way we put things together, we’re going to do it. We’ve done it in the past. We try to do it selectively.”
Basically, we read that as “yes, we’ll kick the tires on a few guys and then lowball them until they sign with another team.” We saw that strategy in action last offseason.
Fortunately, the guys the Packers were looking at were really second-tier guys who ended up not really contributing much elsewhere.
In other words, status quo. The Packers will look at free agents to improve the team, but if everything holds to form, they won’t sign any of them.