Randy from Tyler, Texas
As a lifelong rabid, no-holds-barred Packer fan, "Christl's History" is one of my go-to sites for the Packers. It's just so superior to anything else. The results of all your work in getting the stories and facts out about the Packers is just outstanding. Two questions. Have your feelings or your journalistic approach changed from when you were a sportswriter as opposed to how you approach your articles as the official historian? For the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, you frequently pointed out you were not a Packer fan in your approach, which I believed from the content of your articles. It was just straightforward facts and if pointing out something negative about a player's performance or the Packer team, it was reported but never personal and vice versa. On a pure personal level, I always wondered how you could maintain that given your lifelong interactions with players and the team growing up. You seemed to have so much personal knowledge of the team and players that you could only know by personal contacts along the way. Now as the historian and being completely immersed in the inner workings of the team, do you still approach your articles as a pure historian and not a diehard fan like me and the rest of Packer Nation? Next question is: Do you have plans to do more of the Packer oral histories? I really like getting the players' or Packer organization people's views, where they just honestly lay it out there. I am very hopeful you will be doing more of those. Loved the Bob Schnelker interview a lot.
Thought-provoking questions, so I granted you the floor, partly because I'm not sure where to start. First, thank you for being a longtime loyal reader, and I probably should thank you, too, for those chat questions you used to fire at me like torpedoes when I was working at the Journal Sentinel. In truth, your no-holds-barred questions probably helped build my readership during a seminal period in the newspaper business as we transitioned from typewriters to computers and all that resulted from it.
First, I don't feel like I've had to compromise my journalistic principles as Packers historian. I understand there are certain topics best avoided on occasion at our website, but that doesn't affect me much because I'm writing about history. Nobody is taking a carving knife to my copy, either, and telling me I can't write about this or that, or that a subject is too controversial or whatever. My immediate bosses have been more than supportive about that, and Mark Murphy has never wavered in his commitment to getting our history right nor has he ever micro-managed anything I've done. I've never talked to him specifically about this, but I sense he believes as I do: How could our history be accurately portrayed if it was cast only in a positive light? What's more, if I didn't tell the bad with the good, why would any of you believe anything I wrote?
More to the point, my objective as team historian is no different than what it was as a sportswriter: To do my job to the best of my ability by writing informative, fair, accurate and unvarnished stories. My approach to reporting hasn't changed either. I try to gain as much knowledge as possible through study, observation and interviews, and then impart to the readers. Also, I should note that in my position as historian, I'm anything but completely immersed with the team. In fact, I don't go into the locker room. I don't attend interview sessions. I don't watch games from the press box. Those are working areas and I don't belong there if I'm not actually working a game or whatever. That's why I tell people, I used to know far more inside stuff on the Packers when I was a sportswriter than I do now as an employee.
Am I a fan now? I'm not sure if I know what a fan is. Does that mean when I'm watching a game I have to act like I'm at a WWE event? Even as a kid, I don't remember investing myself emotionally in many games. I watched games to learn about players and gain insight into teams even before I was a teenager and that's basically the approach I still take today. When I sit around thinking about games and teams that I watched in the 1950s and '60s, I don't relive memories of big wins or big plays. I'm more inclined to think about the names of, say, the 22 starters on the Bears on Stadium Dedication Day in 1957, or for the Cardinals in their last year in Chicago, or maybe the starters on the Houston Oilers and Los Angeles/San Diego Chargers in the first two AFL championship games in 1960 and '61. Just recently, I was watching my grandson having a good afternoon playing for his high school baseball team when my wife poked me and said, "This isn't a press box, you can cheer and clap."
Hopefully, at some point, I'll resume the oral histories. I have a number of interviews I haven't posted yet, but some are with obscure players that weren't great interviews or they're really short interviews that wouldn't make for a good post. And because of the book, I don't have the time now to conduct and transcribe more interviews.
One last point I'd like to make is that someone in my early years as a sportswriter suggested that I try to surprise people every time I wrote a story. I consider it one of the best pieces of advice that I was ever given. Every day of my career, and especially if there was a major story that everybody was going to be writing about, I tried to find an angle that nobody else would likely take.
Sadly, what I call "drumbeat journalism" seems to have overtaken today's sports coverage and I think the Packers have become recent victims. Because they are so popular and have been so good for close to three decades, they're a favorite subject of talking heads, ex-jocks and others who clearly have no real insight into the team. Case in point: All the mindless babbling of late about how the Packers lack talent on offense. Considering they have had only two draft picks higher than 20th in the last 12 years and none higher than 12th, I believe Ted Thompson and Brian Gutekunst have done a remarkable job assembling talent on that side of the ball, starting with Aaron Rodgers, Thompson's first draft pick and one of the three best quarterbacks of the past 15 years, along with Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. But also look at the rest of the offense compared to other NFL teams. The Packers had one of the best offensive lines in the league last season until David Bakhtiari got hurt, and it was still solid in the playoffs even without its best player. They had a top-five, maybe top-three wide receiver in Davante Adams. In addition, Marquez Valdes-Scantling led the NFL with a 20.9-yard average per catch, more than 2 yards better than any other receiver in the league. Even on the days he might drop two of five, no defense can ignore his threat any time he takes a snap. Allen Lazard might not be Adam Thielen or Cole Beasley, at least at this point, but he wouldn't rank too far down the list of what could be classified as more self-made receivers. The Packers also had a top-seven, maybe even a top-five running back in Aaron Jones. Plus, last year, they had as deep a set of runners as any team in the league with Jamaal Williams and AJ Dillon behind Jones. At tight end, Robert Tonyan scored 11 touchdowns, tying Kansas City's Travis Kelce for most in the league at that position and two more than Las Vegas' Darren Waller. Granted, Kelce and Waller are exceptional talents at that position, but how many other teams had a better pass-catching tight end than Tonyan? Of the top 13 receivers at tight end in terms of catches, only Kelce at 13.5, Baltimore's Mark Andrews at 12.1 and Miami's Mike Gesicki at 13.3 had a better average per catch than Tonyan's 11.3. Not even Waller beat Tonyan's average. How many other teams in the league had better offensive personnel than the Packers last year, counting Rodgers and not counting him?
Let's look back to 2007, when the Packers lost to the Giants in the NFC championship and just three years after Mike Sherman's last draft as GM. In Pro Football Weekly's annual preseason rankings by position based on feedback from NFL executives, coaches and scouts, the Packers didn't have a player ranked better than 10th. Donald Driver, after his 92-catch 2006 season, the best of his career, was ranked 12th at wide receiver. And that was a big jump from the previous year when he was ranked 27th after back-to-back 80-catch seasons. Even when he was the Packers' No 1 receiver many scouts still considered him more of a No. 2. Back to 2007: Besides Driver, no other Packer receiver was ranked among the league's top 32. At tight end, no Packer was listed among the top 15. At running back, no Packer was ranked among the top 30. At tackle, Chad Clifton was ranked 10th and Mark Tauscher 23rd. No Packer was rated among the top 19 guards or among the best 21 centers. Obviously, the disparity in talent between the 2007 and 2020 Packers was huge even though both teams ended their seasons in the NFC title game.
Plus, on defense, at what are the two most valued positions in the NFL outside of quarterback and arguably the two toughest to fill, the Packers have drafted two of the best in the league in the last five years: Kenny Clark is a rare dominant defensive lineman, and Jaire Alexander is one of the league's premier cornerbacks.
I've got news for the networks, websites and newspapers that keep preaching their poppycock about the Packers' lack of talent. It would be a lot cheaper to hire a mynah bird to do their talking if that's all the insight they have to offer.
https://www.packers.com/news/the-sad-state-of-drumbeat-journalism