The frustrating part of these kinds of stories is they look at is as either/or.
"Either you spend $100 million on an old player who is so lousy his current team released him or you do nothing at all other than dig thru the scrapheap and look for a third line backup that you can pay the min salary."
There are more options that that.
But the NFL is littered with examples of teams that spent wildly in March and flopped miserably in the fall.
It's Uncle Teddy smarter than that? Can't he find a quality player who is not over priced who will fill one of the holes? I think so. Apparently he doesn't.
Thompson’s approach is working, based on the Packers’ NFC-best 47-17 regular-season record since 2009. They are the only NFC team to qualify for the postseason the past four years.
The anti-Thompson faction will argue that the Packers didn’t advance past the divisional round of the playoffs the last two years because they didn’t sign any impact free agents.
I guess it depends on what your goal is. Is it to be over .500? It is merely to qualify for the playoffs? Or is it to win championships? If the goal is the later then the team has not been extremely successful. They have won a championship but this team has the makings of winning a few. But they are trying to do so shorthanded.
Former Packers vice president of player finance Andrew Brandt, now an ESPN analyst, described Thompson’s philosophy on Twitter last week: “Strategy in (Green Bay) was to hope for as much ‘stupid money’ spent in early days of free agency, then sift through rest of group.”
I do not object to this philosophy. I used a similar tactic in fantasy baseball for years. (an auction league.) During the first few years the other owners frequently overspent for the highest priced talent and I was able to acquire the second level talent pretty reasonably. (in other words I had 3-4 maybe 5 All Stars instead of one or two Hall of Famers.)
I won one year and finished 2nd 4 years in a row and 6 out of 7 years. Then something happened. Over time the other owners learned and slowly brought their spending per player down. Because I had been use to sitting and waiting for the marquee players to go on by I got caught short the last 2-3 years. By waiting I ended up with holes in my roster. As an example I didn't have a quality 2nd baseman or was short good players in the OF and had to scramble just to fill the position.
The point is there is always going to be some owner or GM who overpays for FAs. But not every quality FA is someone that has to be acquired by paying him more than he is worth. The argument is always that they need to save the money to pay Aaron Rodgers and CM3. That is just hogwash. Are these guys so petty they will only stick with GB if they can soak every single nickle out of the organization? I don't think so. Put a championship caliber team on the field on both sides of the ball and get to the NFC CG year in and year out and these guys will stick even if they get paid a few million less than the max price.