I can’t talk about the Packers’ offensive line renovations without using hyperbolic language.
You generally want to avoid descriptors like “desperate” and “panicked” and “last-ditch attempt to save their season and their job” when trying to write something that resembles a sober, reasoned analysis of a team. On the one hand, it’s rarely this bad. On the other hand, it presents you as the kind of person who can’t be trusted to respond appropriately to things.
But seriously, how else would you describe what the Packers have been doing over the last few days? After a truly apocalyptic start to the year, the Packers signed three different replacement offensive linemen, hitting the Cowboys’ practice squad for Laken Tomlinson and picking up Mekhi Becton and Kevin Zeitler off the street.
This is a virtually unprecedented flurry of activity in any corner of Packers history that I know of. I’ve been writing about this team in one form or another for about 20 years now and was a fan long before that, and I don’t recall any sort of mid-season renovation in a position group like the one we’re seeing now.
The Packers have added notable free agents mid-season before, but it’s usually one at a time. They tried to recruit late-career mercenaries with guys like Snacks Harrison and Whitney Mercilus. They added Cedric Benson just before the start of the 2012 season to fix a moribund running room. Perhaps the most famous example of all is Andre Rison, claimed off waivers at the end of the 1996 season.
But these are all one-off movements. It’s completely different.
Tomlinson, Becton and Zeitler could all start for the Packers. Two of the three, to some extent, will probably start sooner rather than later. Considering how the injury bug has infected the Packers offensive line, it wouldn’t be surprising to see them all in the starting lineup at some point.
This is not normal! You don’t just sign three new starting offensive linemen during the season! This would be notable enough to be notable if they had done it in the offseason, but here we are in late September discussing three new linemen joining the team. It’s bananas!
We can only speculate about the cause of this sudden flurry of activity. The need for help was obvious to anyone with eyes, but neither Brian Gutekunst nor Matt LaFleur seemed too inclined to do anything during the first three weeks. We saw Donovan Jennings get pushed around on the field for almost two weeks before Lafleur even tried Jager Burton at left guard, for God’s sake, and before the spending spree of the last few days, Brian Gutekunst’s big move was signing Cordell Volson to the practice squad.
Did Ed Policy cause a crisis? Did he issue an ultimatum to the recently extended Gutekunst and LaFleur, “fix it or you’re fired”? It’s hard not to conclude that something happened behind closed doors, because we’ve all had a very un-Packers-like few days since they suffered an embarrassing home loss to the Falcons on Thursday Night.
No one knows whether these measures will ultimately help or not, but we will certainly find out. But whether it works or not, the Packers are taking unprecedented steps. Who knows what caused it, but we can’t avoid words that accurately describe what it is. It’s desperate, it’s more than a little panic, and it all might still have been for nothing.
Gn sports
