When Dakota speaks on Rodgers like this, here is what I see:

Ted Thompson sitting in a comfy chair in the grotto wearing his safari hat and sunglasses, a smoking jacket over his silk pajamas, puffing on a pipe, drinking a Dos Equis and two slightly plumb pasty white Wisconsin chicks clad in cheese foam bras and panties sitting on each arm of his chair each with one arm on his shoulder.

He snaps his fingers and says, “Chives, go get me Gronkowski!”

He then turns to Dakota and says, "I don’t find TEs very often, but when I do I find me some Gronkowskis."

Originally Posted by: Barfarn 

Yeah, yeah - and having mediocrity at one of the skill positions on a prolific offense is fucking stupid and epic failure from our GM. And some of you guys defend that stupid shit.

Originally Posted by: DakotaT 

Accepting you cannot have 22 All Pro future Hall of Famer's is not accepting mediocrity on the roster. It's more likely that folks understand the NFL has a Salary Cap, roster limitation, and the pool of talent in the NFL is spread thin among 32 NFL teams.



I sure as heck hope we try to find one! I really think a middle field stretching TE would do the offense magic.

Originally Posted by: Zero2Cool 

Does GB use all of their salary cap?

Originally Posted by: Wade 

Packers have $6.953 million of the 2015 Salary Cap that can be carried over to 2016.

Originally Posted by: Zero2Cool 

And the Packers had more than one whose quality might have been substantially increased with an extra expenditure of 6 million 2015 dollars, no?

Could one have bought someone better than Rodgers at TE with 6 million? Better than Perillo or the other guy whose name I can't remember?

No team can afford to pay 22 all-pros. But any team can, and should, be spending money to improve at positions where they don't have all-pros. And the farther a position is from having an all-pro, one might argue, the more effort they need to be giving to upgrade.

And few positions on the GB roster have current personnel performed at a level more below the all-pro level than TE.

Originally Posted by: Wade 

I thought that six+ million was AFTER the Daniels re-signing?

I understand the need to keep a fund for during-season/injury-replacement signings. Yet with all the injuries the Packers had, they still didn't use that much?

I think the point others are making is that this is not a one-time thing for Thompson. How many years have the Packers had "money left" despite having lots of injuries? How many years have they had *more* than $6-7 left?

Any financial manager worth his/her salary knows the importance of saving for contingent risks. But any financial manager worth that salary also knows that too much saving is also a bad thing. Any financial manager knows you also have to take risks, some of them substantial.

The real question is where do you draw the line. I don't think anyone has argued that Thompson should be taking the risk management approach that Dan Snyder does. That would be like your financial adviser telling you to put all your money into naked option trading. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

But there is a difference between conservative and TOO DAMN CONSERVATIVE. Which is the argument that many Ted Thompson critics are making.

But the last isn't my argument, though. Me, I think the more damning argument against Thompson is that he doesn't diversify enough against the big risks he does take. Putting as many of his personnel investment eggs as he does into the "draft and develop" basket means he isn't gaining the diversification insurance that comes from splitting that personnel investment into assets that are different in kind (and so less correlated with each other's return).

In the way he apportions his buying between draft and free agency/trades, he's a riverboat gambler. A different sort of gambler than Snyder, but a serious gambler nonetheless. Snyder is a high-stakes pot limit Omaha player in Las Vegas. Thompson is a medium stakes limit stud player somewhere in New England I don't want him hanging out in Vegas. But I do wish he'd spend a little more time than he does at the higher stake limit games at the Bellagio. With his bankroll, and his general high level poker abilities, he would actually reduce his overall risk by doing so.

I think if Ted actually put his full range of skills to work he would have all the people who currently rave about his excellentness still raving plus have a lot of us bitchers on his bandwagon as well. Because when it comes down to it, Thompson is going to outperform Daniel Snyder regardless. If I had $150 million to bankroll one GM/owner in poker, and Thompson agreed to vary his game more, I'd put him against anyone in the league except maybe Belichek.

John Elway has been outperforming Thompson in my opinion. But if Thompson agreed to diversify his approach among draft-and-develop, free agency, and trading more, everything else he brings to the table means he'd blow that arrogant b*stard from Stanford/Denver out of the water. Year after year.

Originally Posted by: Wade