He was limited to 140 characters by Twitter, but Eliot Wolf, the assistant director of player personnel for the Green Bay Packers, didn’t even need that many to make his point about the performance of his boss on the second day of the NFL draft.
“Ted Thompson (is) killing it right now,” Wolf tweeted from the Packers’ draft room.
Killing it, indeed.
Despite assembling a Super Bowl-winning team in 2010, Thompson has been a lightning rod for criticism since becoming general manager of the Packers in 2005. He’s been called too conservative, too rigid, too patient in building a team.
He’s been ripped for his drafts, particularly his early ones, due to his penchant for trading down instead of up. He has been chided for virtually ignoring free agency.
Thompson started chipping away at his image as a draft-day conservative when he traded up into the first round to take outside linebacker and pass-rushing whiz Clay Matthews in 2009. But while that didn’t eliminate his conservative stigma for good, Friday’s performance might have.
Just months after a season in which his defense suffered a complete meltdown, Thompson became a rambling, gambling man in the draft room. He was on the attack from the beginning. He had a defense to fix and nothing, it seemed, was going to stand in his way.
A day after taking USC outside linebacker Nick Perry — a much-needed bookend for Matthews — in the first round, Thompson quickly showed that he wasn’t messing around. He traded up twice — TWICE! — in the second round Friday to add defensive players he coveted.
Thompson’s first trade jumped the Packers up eight spots to take Michigan State defensive tackle Jerel Worthy, who may be a pariah to University of Wisconsin fans but in many ways is a younger B.J. Raji. Draft-watchers were barely digesting that move when Thompson traded up into the bottom portion of the second round and grabbed cornerback Casey Hayward of Vanderbilt at pick No. 62.
“I’ve gone crazy,” Thompson said, joking after his day’s work was done.