In the years after the Green Bay Packers won Super Bowl XLV, they were a team content with what they had.
Under general manager Ted Thompson, the yearly roster turnover consisted mostly of draft picks and rookie free agents moving someone more experienced off the 53-man roster.
Counting only players who were new to the team, turnover consisted of 10 players in 2011, 13 in 2012, 12 in 2013, 11 in 2014, 10 in 2015 and 14 in 2016.
Gutekunst has been true to his word, signing unrestricted free agents, making trades, attempting to steal other teams’ players with offer sheets and throwing his hat in the ring in the Khalil Mack sweepstakes.
Assuming there will be some tinkering with the roster this week, Gutekunst as of Sunday had added 19 players to the roster who were somewhere else last year. That’s a 35.8 percent turnover, which is a considerable jump from a nine-year average of 26.4 percent from 2011-17.
There will be a crowd that will consider him a coward for not going further down the path in the Mack negotiations, but as some who know him well said Sunday, he wasn’t going to meet the Oakland Raiders’ price.
It would not be out of the realm of possibility if he allowed his former colleague, Raiders general manager Reggie McKenzie, to tell the Bears he was offering two first-round draft picks just to drive the trade price up for his division rival. One former colleague of Gutekunst’s said there's no way the first-year general manager would have put two firsts on the table for Mack in a serious effort to acquire him.
Even if Gutekunst could have met McKenzie’s price, the financial commitment that came with it would have handcuffed the team for years to come. The Packers would have had the highest-paid player on offense and the highest-paid player on defense and the two of them would have accounted for at least a quarter of the team’s salary-cap space this year and probably more in the coming years.