I keep hearing mentions that we're the youngest team in the NFL. But do we have the youngest starters? Looking at their ages, I highly doubt that.

Projected starters:

Offense:

QB - Aaron Rodgers - 26
OT - Chad Clifton - 33
OG - Jason Spitz - 27
C - Scott Wells - 29
OG - Josh Sitton - 23
OT - Mark Tauscher - 32
WR - Greg Jennings - 26
WR - Donald Driver - 35
TE - Jermichael Finley - 23
RB - Ryan Grant - 27
FB - John Kuhn - 27

Defense:

DE - Ryan Pickett - 30
NT - BJ Raji - 23
DE - Cullen Jenkins - 29
LB - Brad Jones - 24
LB - AJ Hawk - 26
LB - Nick Barnett - 29
LB - Clay Matthews - 24
CB - Charles Woodson - 33
CB - Al Harris - 34
SS - Atari Bigby - 28
FS - Nick Collins - 26

Just something I'm curious about and news has been slow.

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There's some nice stuff about this on this  site.

Last year our starting squad was the 9th oldest in the league. The team's overall young age comes from the fact that Thompson tends to build depth through the draft and undrafted free agent acquisitions as opposed to adding veteran depth.

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Ah ha. 9th oldest. That sounds about right when we're talking about starters.

Thanks Rock for that other link. By Rock's, we're in the middle when it comes to age.

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I was harping on this a bit last year. I think the "youngest team" label, while technically true, is misleading. Thanks to Nonstop for finding direct evidence of this.

Another thing that bothers me is when the Packers' penalties are blamed on them being the youngest team in the league. This is accepted as truth without question, but it sure seems to me like the veterans commit more penalties than the young guys.

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Another one,"We get penalized a lot because our defense is aggressive. False. Most of or penalties are on offense/special teams.

Excellent points, Greg and Dave. I would love to see a breakdown of the team's penalties. I have a suspicion special teams would top the list.

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Not so sure about that, however if you were to do a % of penalties based on the amount of plays each of the 3 units was on the field, i'm sure ST would top the list by a massive margin! 😃

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True. I imagine the ratio would be frightful.

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Probably, but wouldn't that be true for most teams? A comparison of our team with the others, based on the percentage of special teams plays with penalties, would be most interesting. I don't know if that information would be available anywhere.

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