Hi, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Packers Unscripted from Packers dot com. I am like Spofford, he is my trusted colleague Weston Hodkoitz. We're coming to you from different locations here at lambeau Field and Wes. It's been such a crazy offseason. I can't even get in the studio now, so I'm up on the fifth floor. I think just down the hall. You're down that way, maybe that way.
I'm not sure exactly where you are, but anyway, we are here to resume the podcast and latest unscripted episode. And since our last episode, you were able to cover a press conference that was related to the Packers hosting the draft in twenty twenty five, so I wanted to follow up on that and find out what exactly you learned, because the biggest thing that I from it is that the NFL is going to come into Green Bay here at some point and figure out how to run this
whole show. But a lot of the details still very much up in the air as to exactly how this is going to work.
Yeah, boss, I mean that was probably my I learned so much, especially our VP of Marketing and fan Engagement, Gabrielle DOAO. It was very enlightening in terms of kind of pulling back some of the layers of the onion and understanding not only what's involved with the packers making the pitch, but what it means once the NFL actually accepts the bid. And one of the big things that I think is, but I've been driving home with our Insider inbox column, is the green Bay Packers City of
green Bay are providing the canvas. This is now whatever the NFL wants to paint on it. We know that there's going to be the Lambefield campus involved. That is the resh Center, to our east, the Rush Expo, the ninety three million dollar project here that has brought a lot of new commerce into the area, Lambefield itself, and
then to our west, title Town. Those four areas are going to be where you're going to see the media stages, the red carpets, the media rooms, everything related to probably the publicity of the event.
The draft stage is completely up to the NFL. They could put it on Lambeau Field, but it's one hundred yard stage, so it would eat up the entire field. If that's the route they went, you know, maybe they have the rest Center available, a lot of different avenues potentially outside, as we've seen some of these concerts recently Train you know, these free concerts have had the stages
outside as well. But the fact is that was the most impressive to me that Gabrielle mentioned was Green Bay was really the first team since the NFL started moving around the NFL Draft that it was fronted by the city, by the team they pursued the draft. They wanted this event to be here. Certainly for the green Bay Packers. We're never going to have a Super Bowl here. You and I both know it, at least during our lifetimes. So what does that mean.
That means that this is the biggest event that could be in this place, and the Packers work so diligently, so hard, you know. And last thing I'll just close on is really quickly, the fact that Green Bay was really positioning itself for twenty twenty seven, now twenty twenty six, we're gonna have the Wisconsin Notre Dame game. Twenty twenty seven is where they had their sites turned to. They didn't think from what the NFL was saying, that twenty
five was going to be a possibility. January, the NFL calls says, hey, you know, we're ready, we will you know, we want to be in consideration for this again. The voters approved it at the spring meetings, and here we go, Michael, in twenty three months, Lambeufield will be home to the NFL Draft.
Yeah, and I think it's great that that the Packers and the city of Green Bay got twenty twenty five because later that year, in that summer, is when Mark Murphy will reach the mandatory retirement age as the president
and CEO of the Packers at age seventy. So this is something he worked so hard, obviously with the other folks that you mentioned, to get the draft to Green Bay, and now he's actually he will still be the president and CEO of the Packers at the time that the event is hosted, and it sort of becomes, you know, the culmination of his long tenure here atop the Packers organization.
So that'll be really exciting. The other thing I want to point out is that for those who are interested in a little bit of history, Cliff Crystal has a story on packers dot com about the only other time that the NFL Draft was held in the state of Wisconsin, and you have to go all the way back to the nineteen forty draft. It was actually held in December of nineteen thirty nine. It was the nineteen forty draft.
It was held at a hotel in Milwaukee the day before the Packers were hosting the nineteen thirty nine NFL
Championship Game. And there's a lot of great details in there, obviously, the stories of the smoke filled rooms and all the NFL owners gathered in one place, and you know the street and Smith's yearbooks, and you know how they got all the scouting information back then and made the select So a really really interesting historical piece on Packers dot Com by our team history and Cliff Crystal for those
I want to check that out. And the draft was like twenty plus rounds or something back then, obviously not as many teams, but twenty plus rounds of selections with with with all the owners smoking their cigars and everything else through throughout a I believe it was a Saturday afternoon, So a really really interesting historical perspective on where the draft is now compared to back then.
I had such a smile on my face.
You can even hear me jrying to jump over you to talk about this when I was editing that, when I was reading it on Thursday, because it was it the way I equated it, the way I'm envisioning it in my mind, Like Cliff did such a great job of creating the detail of it. It reminds me of if you ever had a fantasy football draft where you rented out of a you know, a bar's, you know, ballroom.
To have it. That's basically what it was. Now.
Some of these owners, like Curly Lambell, they were entrenched in all this. They're pick of the players. Some owners weren't. Some owners had coaches and they're just kind of sitting around trying to pass time talking to people in that It just again, there's nothing I love more than the wild West of the National Football League. And you kind of forget at that point nineteen forty they'd only had what five six drafts.
At that point, it all was sort of this.
They didn't know whether to use, you know, like these type of reports or newspapers or not. Some guys just kind of seem like they're picking names out of a hat. But ultimately that's kind of what set the stage for the league that followed in the forties and fifties to come.
Yeah, that was the fifth NFL Draft. The one that will be in Green Bay in twenty twenty five will be the ninetieth NFL Draft, and something tells me it won't be eighty five years again before the draft is back in Green Bay, or at least we can we can hope for that. So I do want to move on west to our impressions of the first week of OTAs, but I will take care of some sponsor business here.
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One per week at this stage of the off season is open to the media, and we will have another one this week, which we can talk about on our next show, but I'll just toss it out to you. Very open ended, What were your initial impressions, What caught your eye the first time seeing the twenty twenty three Packers, at least in terms of the off season roster on the field together.
Christian Watson's body, I think is probably the first thing that caught my eye. I mean, my goodness, the dude, in his last press conference with us the Locker Room Availed or Locker Room clean Out Day, talked about how his big goal for the offseason was kind of building himself up better and making sure he gets his body prepared to handle the strength, you know, the stresses of in his seventeen game season.
Obviously, you got to play the games. You have to get on the field.
But if you ever want to talk about a kid that took that seriously, I mean, I don't know if there's any body fat on him right now. I mean, he just looks strong and lean and fast, and I thought, you know, made some of the biggest plays of the
practice in that final two minute period. The offense got off to a little bit of a slow start, but you could I enjoyed and watching how you know, Jordan Love sort of rallied the troops there the second half and then and it is the red zone period is obviously tailor to the offense to a certain extent, but the confidence, the the you know, arm strength, everything. I thought Jordan Love finished the practice on a high note.
And that post in the back of the end zone that he threw to Christian Watson, we didn't have a you know, a radar gun on it, but my goodness, that was a fastball that he threw to that kid. And you know, by and large, it's just one practice. We don't know what any of these other ones have looked like. But I was really impressed by what I saw from the young QB.
Yeah, the the offense definitely got off to a slow start in terms of the eleven on eleven work that we were watching, but then it seemed as later in the practice got into a red zone period and things started to click a little bit, and we saw in you know, in a span of about five or six red zone snaps, we saw Christian Wattson, Romeo Dobbs, and Soamori Toure all catch touchdown passes from Love toward the end of practice. So the offense definitely finished on a
high note. A couple other things that stood out to me. I guess I would say the impression that we had talked about on a previous show of seeing Lucas van Ness in person, the first round draft pick at edge rusher, that sort of carried over. I guess I would say to OTAs where he wasn't just you know, on the field in a rookie mini camp with a bunch of rookies and other tryout guys, like he's out there with, you know, with all the guys and certainly looks from
a physical standpoint like he belongs to me. You can just see the physique and the build and the way he carries himself, the way he gets off the ball on the snap in the eleven on eleven all that you can see why this guy was a first round draft pick. So a long way to go. He's got a lot to learn in terms of the defensive scheme and what role he's going to fit best in Joe Berry's defense. But that impression from rookie mini caamp definitely
carried over. And the other thing that caught my eye too, in terms of watching both Sean Clifford and Danny Ettling as the backup quarterbacks running things with the second and third units. The ball seemed to find Don Tavian Wis, the fifth round rookie out of Virginia. Ball seemed to find him on a pretty regular basis when we were watching the eleven on eleven's with the twos and the three. So that's something that I'm going to keep my eye
on two here moving forward. Obviously there's no pads. It's you know, the underwear league as they call it in OTAs. But certainly as far as first impressions go, that definitely stood out to me as well, just in terms of the number of times that that the ball was headed his way and he was able to make the plays.
I totally understand because we're gonna hear it on Wednesday, probably from Matt Leaflor too. You can't crown anybody off of these OTA's practices. But what I always say, I always kind of take the opposite approach to it. You also know what it looks like when guys aren't making plays. You know what it feels like when guys aren't When you get through a practice and you're like, oh, I didn't hear so and so's name the entire time Tay Wicks was in that entire practice, I thought made his
presence felt. And I'll always mention this, Michael. It is about consistency. It's about stacking every single day. But what did we say all off season about Romeo Dobbs last year? And he kept doing it? And then it's like, okay, well he was doing it once a week during OTA's with no pads, how's it going to look in training camp? And then it's kept happening during training camp and it
started happening in the preseason games. Next thing you know, he's the Week three NFL Offensive Player of the Week. That stuff come pounds because it's not just about okay, he's getting confidence. No, it's telling you something about this player. When you put that stuff on film, that's what we know, Mike. You and I can pontificate and guess all of this stuff and where guys are gonna go, But until you actually see it, that's where you first can really start
to believe it. And I just I was really impressed by the young man because coming out of Virginia, what an interesting story. Your story's up right now on packers dot Com. A really enlightening look into his path and how he got to Virginia and what he made out of the opportunity. The young man just graduated college, which he joked about in the locker room last week that his mom was probably more excited about getting that degree
than she was actually him getting drafted. But the way he carries himself in the approach he took during a very trying senior year, this is a new chapter for him now. And as you know, one of the things I put in Insider inbox when you get these young guys that aren't first round picks, that are Day three picks, maybe had one season where they kind of lit things up, but then maybe didn't finish the way they wanted to. It's not about how you got here in the build.
It's what you do now that you are here in the third round picks, the fifth round picks that have succeeded on Marquez Valdez, Scantling and Aaron Jones, That's what they did. It didn't matter once they were here where they were drafted. It mattered what they were able to accomplish when they were finally in this offense.
And it's wide open.
Yeah, And Wix is intriguing to me too. And we just posted a story that I had written on him, mostly off of an interview during the rookie Mini camp just about not saying that there's been a boatload of adversity that this young man necessarily has overcome. But you mentioned obviously a very trying final season at Virginia and there's a coaching change and a system change, and things didn't go all that well after a really really big season in twenty twenty one, will you rewind the clock
a little bit further. This is a young man from Louisiana who wanted to play Power five Conference NCAA football, and within two weeks before signing day as a senior in high school, he didn't have a five offer. He was most likely going to be staying at home at Louisiana Lafayette, staying in state. He did have a Division one offer, and that was looking like where he was headed.
Suddenly Virginia swoops in at the last minute, and within a span of like a week to ten days, he went from you know, staying in state at a smaller school in Division one to suddenly getting an offer and making his commitment to Virginia to play in the ACC And then obviously a few years later he becomes a fifth round draft pick of the Green Bay Packers. So this is a young man that you just you can't count him out right, I mean, he's he's been up
against it before. And as you said, it's a wide open position group in terms of the depth chart for the Packers heading into twenty twenty three. Also, with regard to the depth chart, I don't want to get too far into the weeds here because there were some veterans who were not at the practice that we witness last week. OTAs are voluntary, not mandatory, except pretty stretch except for
what we'll be there when, when required. But the one thing on the depth chart that that did sort of follow our projections when we were previewing OTAs is that Rudy Ford was with the number one defense at safety alongside Darnell Savage. At least that is where things are starting.
Now.
We know that with with Jonathan Owens and in his gains and and the draft pick Anthony Johnson Junior, all sorts of different possibilities as far as how things could go at safety. But in chatting with Darnell Savage afterward, you know, he obviously went through a lot of ups and downs last season in twenty twenty two, and you know, it's not just to say that that he's that he you know, is ready to put twenty twenty two behind him. He genuinely, in speaking with the media, just kept talking
about how excited he is for twenty twenty three. He's looking at you know, he's looked at the film. He's learned a lot, but he's also just looking forward to the clean slate and the fresh start and and what a new season can bring for a veteran player whose previous season did not go the way he wanted it to and did not measure up to previous seasons that we've seen from Darnell Savage in this Green Bay Packers defense.
So just just seeing, you know, you don't always see a fifth year guy who's you know, at voluntary OTAs he doesn't have to be here. But he's genuinely, you know, fired up and excited about what lies ahead for him. And I think I think that attitude is something that he wants to see permeate throughout the rest of the defense as he is now really the elder statesman at safety with with Adrian Amos not being re signed as a free.
Agent, and Darnell Savage isn't gonna say this, but I'll be happily say it. I mean, when you talk about a young man that's on the fifth year option, a guaranteed contract for the season, there aren't these huge workout bonuses factored into that like there are other unrestricted free agent contract offers. He is here to get better, and I think he's here to send a message to everybody with the Packers that I am still the first round pick you thought I was four years ago, and I
can be the face of this back end. You know, he made such a great, you know, one to two combo with Adrian Namas. Had felt like their styles really did compliment each other very well. But when the Packers drafted him in twenty nineteen, the first defensive back off the board that year, it was so that he could eventually someday beat the franchise. You know, safety back there the guy that'll be the face of this thing, and
now he's in that position to do so. Mike, I don't know how the safety competition is going to work out. I don't know who's going to prevail if Rudy Ford holds off the pack But what I will say, you know, I go back to twenty thirteen I talk about this a lot, and that was where you had the big switch after that season. That's where they drafted Hock Clinton Dix.
That's where they moved over Micah Hyde. But one of the reasons for that it wasn't we put so much of this on well m d. Jennings or Jeron McMillan. Now I go back to that training camp, Mike. We got to the final week of camp and I didn't know whether or not there would be a fourth safety on the roster. They just didn't have the depth, they didn't have the numbers, and ultimately Chris Banjo end up being that fourth guy, who was a month earlier signed as a rookie free agent.
I love the.
Fact that they cast the net that they did to find a player. You know, you look at Michael, you have Rudy Ford, experience, started games for this defense last year. Then you look at it, Okay, what's going on over here, Well you have you know, Tarvarius Moore coming in, former third round pick, had some injury issues, but looking to come back also gives you some special teams flexibility. Dalan
Levitt a guy that's been there, done that. Jonathan Owens started seventeen games last year, had one hundred and twenty five tackles in nine hundred and eighty snaps. And then the guy that I think very few people have talked about is ns Gains. Where Mike, if you know nothing about pro football, if you know nothing about the players and how they line up on this roster, and you just look at Ennis Gains, the guy looks like an
NFL safety six foot two, two hundred pounds. Can thud I mean they call him thump for a reason.
Right, Yeah, any great name by the way.
Great nickname.
But I think if you notice what happened when he got that second injury with the hamstring, he got you know, the injury designation, and then he came back, he looked like a different guy to me. He looked healthy, he looked confident, and by the end of last year, I think he was running with the number one you know, gunners and jammers on the punt team. So it is
a lot of options for them back there. I don't know who's going to prevail, but I like the fact that they at least gave themselves a multiplicity of things that they could potentially look towards. Also with the fact that sometimes these guys can't switch into the slot as well. We saw it last year with you know, Darnell Savage late.
In the season.
A lot of flexibility with the safety position. In addition to the fact that it is a core play, a core position on special teams or defense.
Yeah, you have you have a mixture of guys who have been here and know the system with other new guys that have a certain level of experience in the NFL with some other team who are learning a new system, but they played a fair amount of NFL football. So it's an interesting mix in terms of how that's going
to sort itself out. One last thing to touch on here before we go west, and that is that we heard from third year cornerback Eric Stokes with regard to his injury from last year in the Detroit game, or I should say injuries really to be accurate, and what has been a very very long recovery process for him. It turns out that in that Detroit game at Ford Field, he suffered both a knee injury and a foot injury. It turns out that and he had to have procedures
done on both. It turns out that the foot injury is the one that was a lot more serious and has required a lot more recovery time. He was actually off the foot completely for multiple months before he was even able to get back on crutches and then get back into walking and running as the off season moved along. But this has been a long process for Eric Stokes and that process continues. He is not out on the practice field yet. He's obviously aiming to try to get
back for training. Cat That may be a little bit aggressive of a timeline considering the foot injury and everything he's had to deal with there. But but we certainly saw, and as you wrote about on our website, another story to check out for those who are interested, that the smiling, somewhat happy, go lucky Eric Stokes is back because he sees the light at the end of the tunnel with regard to this long recovery, and he's one of the guys that that brightens up a locker room, there's no
question about it. And he's looking forward to getting back on the field whenever that may be, and the Packers are certainly going to be patient, but he's looking forward to getting back on the field here at some point in the calendar year twenty two, twenty three.
Mike, you know what impresses me about this young man and you were a part of the scrum a little bit too last Tuesday, was it's really easy to when things are going well, to put up the posts and notes in your locker telling you this is what you wanted and you know now you're living the dream and things like that, and in all this positive affirmation when when things are going well, when you're coming off a year like he did and as a rookie in twenty
twenty one, but to walk the walk when things aren't going great when you do sustain probably the biggest injury of his life with that Liz Frank two you know plate and two screws in his foot and yeah yeah, Eric mentions there was some bad times in there, but to still have the positivity that he has and still have the short memory to want to get back out there and show that the twenty twenty one Eric Stokes was the real deal, that that's the guy that could
potentially be a staple for this defense for years to come. I felt like that was such a huge moment for him and if he can get back off this thing and get back on the field, I think it's going to be something that really propels him into the second chapter of his career, because, as he mentions, you know, last year, even before the injury, it wasn't what he wanted.
You know, he had fourteen pass deflections in a pick in his rookie season, had nine starts last year, you know, eight and a half, you know, before he injured himself in Detroit, and didn't have any pass deflections, didn't have any takeaways. And the key marker for a lot of those players is being able to put all that stuff
behind you as a defensive back and push forward. And I feel like there's so many parallels between him and jyr Alexander that way, that that short memory of having confidence in what you do and knowing that when you get your opportunity, you're going to make the most of it.
Yeah, and we always talk obviously about the year two jump for players, right well, in Stokes's case, as you said, his year two didn't start out the way he wanted.
And now it's almost as though he's going to get a he's going to get a redo on the year two because at the end, at the end of his rookie season, this is a guy that we saw come within an eyelash of a pick six of Jimmy Garoppolo in the playoff game against San Francisco that would have completely turned the game, much as the turnovers did in the other direction. He was, you know, the opportunity was there.
It didn't quite go his way, but then you know, think that it didn't carry over to the following season. So now he gets he gets a reboot with that once he can get himself healthy and get himself back out there. The Packers feel good about where they are with regard to having Alexander and Douglas on the outside. You have Keishawn Nixon in the slot, some other young
depth behind those guys. But when this defense can get Eric Stokes back, and then you're looking at who those top four cornerbacks are when you want to go to a dime package or perhaps some different types of nickel packages using three cornerbacks, just having that many options, his return, whenever that happens in twenty twenty three, his return could be a real boost to the Packers defense.
And let's be honest, Mike, we can tape this right now. We can talk about all these things. There's always things that happen. You know, last year, I think the Packers had a pretty clear vision for how they wanted the safeties and secondary to shake out. It didn't work out that way, you know, with Stokes going down a year earlier.
I don't think anybody thought a shoulder injury sustained in Week four by Jyry Alexander would really turn the tide of what people thought would be a really deep cornerback room. It led to Rasulle Douglass coming in, but as we've seen, I mean, JayR is just a different beast when he's on the field. You need to have your options there at cornerback and I don't know how it'll shape out. I don't know what it's going to look like when
Eric Stokes is clear to perform again. But again, guys do find their opportunities, and a lot of times, unfortunately it has something to do with injuries. So as long as he's still in this thing, as long as he can put that injury behind him and press forward, I still think there's a really bright future there with that kid.
Yeah, well, another OTA practice to watch this week, and locker room interviews and everything else that go along with it. So we'll have plenty more to talk about on our next show, but for now we'll call it a rap on this edition of Packers Unscripty'd be sure to follow all of our coverage of everything going on with the team. Is there for you on packers dot com for Wes, I am Mike. Thank you for tuning in everybody.
We will see you next time.