Ted Thompson has an ego. Every person involved in professional football has an ego. That's the nature of the beast. Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones had egos so big that one of them had to go and obviously it's not the owner going.

Brett Favre has a huge ego and I think it clashed with Ted Thompson several times.

Bill Belichick has an ego.

Tom Brady has an ego. I recall him laughing at the notion that a Giant player said they'd score like 10 points or something. He said has he watched us at all or something like that.

I can go on and on.

Mike Holmgrem's ego is so big that he wants to be a GM again in the NFL after he failed at it once already.

Bill Parcell is another one.

The closes person to not having an ego in professional football was honestly Tony Dungy.

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Hear, hear, excellent post along with all the others who have said you don't get to the top without a bigger than average ego.

I'll tell you one thing, when I saw Ted Thompson in the Detroit airport in jeans and a ratty sweatshirt, pulling his carry-on behind him and standing in line at the gate, I thought to myself, "Get a load of the fucking ego on THIS guy."
And when he came down to the atrium during Fan Fest a few years ago, and signed autographs for everyone who surrounded him, I couldn't help but think, "What kind of an ego do you have to have to come down here and draw attention away from the players by autographing the footballs and programs people are shoving at you?"

Those are my only two personal experiences with TT, but I can safely conclude that he considers himself a god among men.

dhazer will back me up with his own personal stories.

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I think the some of the perception is stemmed from the wording he uses within the media in handling criticism.

After draft selections and a couple of personnel moves in which he encountered heavy criticism, his wording of the answers draw fire in some.

"I make the best decision possible for the future of the Green Bay Packers, I don't think you run the franchise based on the fans views."

To that effect.. Now we all logically know that is the case, but he certainly could word it more effectively than the fans views are meaningless.

The 07 Stockholders meeting I heard that buzz pretty heavily.. I didn't attend last years because of schedule conflicts and honestly I just didn't want to put up with the crowd and negativity.

Never ever directly engage the consumers views and opinions as meaningless.. even if you don't factor them into the decision making.

But in the large scheme of things, the pluses and minuses of the overall job he has done here, it is peanuts in weight.

He is a poor public speaker.. so am I, that is the way some folks are programmed. It is just another flaw amongst the countless I have.

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First of all it is a misnomer that Thompson came in and tore the roster apart. Twenty of twenty two starters in '05 were starters in '04. If Ted were to find a way to keep the other two other starters would have had to been let go to afford them so twenty was the best he could do period.

Every analyst and NFL person in the know, including Ron Wolfe, looked at the Packer roster and said it needed MAJOR repair. Ted Thompson began the process by fixing the very poor depth pool FIRST and then began making decisions on guys like Flannagan, Green, Hondo, etc.

Dhazer, what you need to see is that after '04 there was no more consistant winning going to happen here without bolstering this team back up. Sherman missed way to often in the draft and FA and the defense was getting horrible and what made it worse is we didn't have a backup player at virtually any position.

Our "consistant" winning was "consistantly" going BACKWARDS. We SHOULD have won the SB in '02. From there our record steadily went the wrong way until we finally went one and done at home in the first round in '04 and it wasn't even close. We got our butts handed to us.

We went 10-6 that year and do you know how many teams we beat with a winning record? NONE. 0. ZIP. The next year with virtually the same ball club we win four and your complaining he ripped the roster apart?

I don't understant your position on this Dhazer. You seem much smarter than to be fooled into believing everything was just fine if we had just left it alone. They didn't throw Sherman out the door and bring this guy in to leave things status quo.

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It's true! DH is right! A leading psychotherapist recently broke doctor-patient confidentiality (thereby scuttling his career; it's okay, he got paid millions by FireTedThompson.com to do it), and his diagnosis is that Ted suffers from extreme Hubrisitis. He's also oddly afraid of spiders and the state of Mississippi.

Bummer, huh?

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:lol:
+1.

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Not to pick on one small part of your overall point, which point is very salient (IOW, I very much agree that he's not a good public speaker, and I also agree that public speaking is low on the list of requirements to be an effective GM), but I'm wondering if perhaps how someone perceives that quoted statement, informed by their own views?

For instance, I personally have absolutely NO problem with his statement - crap, spend an hour on these boards, and tell me: Would you listen to us? Not me, and man would our team be a confusing mess. Also, I don't see his statement as suggesting that fans views are meaningless - just that he doesn't feel that fan views are what you base your organizational strategy on.

But someone else who might believe that listening to and appeasing the fans is Job No. 1 could read the same thing and be furious. "How dare he not take our opinions into account?!" And thru that lenz, the same statement above sure does look a lot like "the fans views mean nothing to me; I'll do it how I see fit."

Horses for courses, or something like that.

In the end, as always, the real answer is hiding somewhere between the two extremes - public perception is a bigger deal now that everyone's got access to so much information (how much of it is real information and how much is just drivel that someone threw up on the internets is a very different debate) at their fingertips, but running a franchise based solely on fan opinion would be madness.

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