The Packers thought highly of Hopper in the spring, but won’t put him on the field now.

The Packers  linebackers are at a crossroads. Edgerrin Cooper has been on the shelf for three weeks, battling a hamstring injury. In that span, Quay Walker has played some of his best football — such as it is — in the meantime, while Eric Wilson and Isaiah McDuffie have given the Packers absolutely everything they can while awaiting the return of their dynamic running mate.


At times, it’s been adequate to even good. But against the Lions, the results from the non-Walker linebackers weren’t nearly enough. McDuffie led the team with 15 tackles, but both he and Wilson were repeatedly victimized in the passing game. According to Pro Football Focus charting, the Lions were a combined 13 of 13 passing for 95 yards and two touchdowns when targeting McDuffie and Wilson. (Walker wasn’t much better for his part, surrendering three completions for 32 yards on three targets.)


In short, the Packers linebackers didn’t get the job done. Well, three of them didn’t. There’s a fourth we know practically nothing about, aside from two key facts. First, the Packers love Ty’Ron Hopper. And second, they refuse to play him.


Let’s rewind to April. The Packers selected Hopper with the 91st pick in the draft, spending the third-rounder they’d acquired in their trade with Buffalo to bring the Missouri linebacker to Green Bay. It was a head-scratcher from the jump. Charitably, Hopper was just an okay athlete in pre-draft testing , though he put abysmal agility numbers even with his relatively small size.


What’s more, almost nobody else seems to have considered him as a potential third-round pick. Mock drafts obviously don’t reflect the views of an NFL team, but Hopper was pegged as a potential sixth round pick by the Consensus Mock Draft Big Board, ranked as the 190th overall prospect in this spring’s class .


Don’t like consensus mock drafts? That’s okay, plenty of evaluators, big and small, were down on Hopper, too. The Athletics Dane Brugler put the “inconsistent” Hopper down as a fifth-round prospect in The Beast, as did Bleacher Report  and Lance Zerlein  of NFL.com. Pro Football Focus ranked him as their 191st overall prospect.


But Brian Gutekunst? He told the media he had a second-round grade on Hopper. Or better. Asked in April if he felt he got five of his top 50 players with the Packers’ first five picks in the draft, Gutekunst said he did.


“Yeah,” he said . “All of the guys came out of our top two rounds.”


If true, that’s an incredible value for Hopper at 91, but it’s a huge departure from how virtually everyone else has talked about him. And, with the Packers in need of more help at linebacker, it leads to an obvious question: if the Packers think Hopper is so good, why don’t they play him?


Through 14 weeks, Hopper has been on the field for just seven defensive snaps, all coming at the tail end of the Packers’ Week 12 dismantling of the 49ers . Outside of that, he’s been relegated to special teams duty exclusively, even there playing the most minimally impactful units of kickoff coverage and kickoff return.


This, despite the obvious deficiencies elsewhere on the linebacker depth chart. This, despite Edgerrin Cooper’s ongoing hamstring issues, which limited him for much of the early portion of the season and have now recurred. Despite a glaring need, the Packers won’t put their self-described top-50 prospect on the field.


Is it buyer’s remorse? Were the blowing smoke in April or are they asleep at the stick now? None of the answers to those questions are likely to come any time soon, but perhaps the Packers should be trying to find them by putting a player they claimed to love on the field.










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