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Packers Forum 2018 NFL Draft Discussion (NO SPOILERS!)


CWood21

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Here is a piece I got from the 'Great Blue North' site (who i believe got it from OurLads). It grades the strength of the draft over time at various positions. Here are the draft average strength figures, the 2017 figures and this years figures. It's the first time I have seen numbers attached to the quality of a draft.

POS AVE  2017  2018
QB    12      10      13
RB    23      29      22
WR   31      32      33
TE    15      14      14
OT   23       18      18
G/C 20       15      20

 

DT    18       20     22
DE    21       23     20
ILB  10       12     18
OLB 22       20     23
CB   33       32     27
S     18        24     19
ST    4         4        7

There were several things i found interesting here. The strength at the QB position was just a hair above average - I thought they'd be higher. 2017 was tremendous at RB and S.
I thought CB was considered strong this year (though not so much in round 1), but by these figures it's below par.
Some on this forum thought TEs, WRs and OLB were weak this year, but this chart says they were a hair above average (or a hair below for TEs).
It is time the OT position got back to it's par of 23 (last two years were 18, 18).
Lots more ST guys drafted this year, over the average.
This years strongest position over average, was at ILB.

Taking the combined figures, the average draft strength was 124 on offense and 126 on defense (total 250).
The 2017 draft combined figures were 118 offense, 135 defense (total 253 and defense heavy).
The 2018 draft combined figures were 120 offense, 136 defense (total 256 and again, defense heavy).

Until I read this i had thought the 2017 draft was better than this years. These figures say not.

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3 hours ago, OneTwoSixFive said:

@blueswedeshoes I was close (wanting to trade down in the first and up in the 2nd or 3rd. Well we did trade down in the first and we did trade back up to the third. Close, but not quite as I hoped, and I'm sure no-one predicted us gaining a 1st.

I suspect that structure was worked out with NO and Seattle in advance predicated upon players being where teams were hoping they would be.

But that may have been tense in the war room as Green Bay waited for Seattle's final okay to the trade back up.

We may have something in Brian Gutenkinst; we still need the first five and a couple of the last six players he drafted to be productive (especially a receiver, pleez), but that was some very deft moving around.

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Read/heard that most of the trade discussions that GB did in the first round had been negotiated in the 2-3 days leading up to the draft.   GB knew that SEA wanted to acquire more picks, so moving back up with them was a high likely situation.  What NO was willing to give to move up from 27, was also mostly negotiated ahead of time. 

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27 minutes ago, squire12 said:

Read/heard that most of the trade discussions that GB did in the first round had been negotiated in the 2-3 days leading up to the draft.   GB knew that SEA wanted to acquire more picks, so moving back up with them was a high likely situation.  What NO was willing to give to move up from 27, was also mostly negotiated ahead of time. 

I remember Gute saying in his presser the NO deal came out of nowhere.

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11 hours ago, squire12 said:

Read/heard that most of the trade discussions that GB did in the first round had been negotiated in the 2-3 days leading up to the draft.   GB knew that SEA wanted to acquire more picks, so moving back up with them was a high likely situation.  What NO was willing to give to move up from 27, was also mostly negotiated ahead of time. 

Yea I think Pat Kirwan mentioned in his book that most trades are discussed before draft day at least on a basic framework/conceptual level. Enough calls are made and research done that they probably have a handful of contingency plans for getting from any given spot to another.

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So let’s start at the end, in an effort to trace what the 14th overall pick, Gutekunst’s first with the trigger, wound up becoming. Pair that one with third-round (76th overall) and sixth-round (186th overall) picks, and Green Bay wound up with the 18th overall pick, fifth-round (147th overall) and seventh-round (248th overall) picks in this year’s draft, and the Saints’ first-round pick in 2019.

If you want to put faces to the numbers, they gave up slots that became Davenport, QB Mason Rudolph (Seattle traded 76 to Pittsburgh), and new Seahawks LB Jacob Martin for Louisville CB Jaire Alexander, capital to deal up (they paired 147 with the 101st pick) for Vanderbilt LB Oren Burks, Southeastern Missouri State OLB Kndeall Donnerson, and the future 1.

e end, Gutekunst was plenty happy with what became of it.

“Oh yeah,” he said from his office on Tuesday afternoon. “We were (picking) a lot higher than we have been in most of the recent past here. And I certainly wasn’t thinking much about moving back. But when the opportunity presented itself with the 1 and the 5, and feeling like we’d be able to get to the point where we could take the guy we were going to take anyway, it made sense.”

But as Gutekunst hinted there, things very easily could’ve gone in another direction. In fact, during the days leading up to the draft, the Packers were a little more interested in moving up than they were moving down.

Green Bay went in with two clusters of players. One was made up of a handful of names they’d consider dealing up for. The other was comprised of a half-dozen players who would be considered values at 14. And Gutekunst, thanks to experience he gained under Thompson, had a good gauge on what the price of moving up and down would be Thursday.

Over the last six years, Gutekunst and Eliot Wolf (now the Browns assistant GM) were tasked by Thompson with working the phones in the weeks leading up to the draft, and would present the GM with resulting ideas for moving up and down. That gave Gutekunst good grounding in working the market, as he eased college director Jon-Eric Sullivan and pro director John Wojciechowski into the “caller” roles.

Gutekunst talked to the Saints during the week, and the conversation got more serious with two calls Thursday, with New Orleans asking what it would take to get to 14. But for the deal to come together, two things would need to happen. First, the players from the Packers’ first cluster would have to be gone, with any trade-up attempts having failed. Second, Davenport would have to be there.

Once (the top-tier players) were gone, then we had a handful of players with the value that we’d take at 14,” Gutekunst says. “And when we moved back, we knew if we wanted to get one of those players, we’d probably have to move back up. That’s what drove that decision. If we can get back into that area where there are these same kind of players, then we will.”

The instant the Packers came off the clock, the calls started—to every team down to the 22nd pick, which is about where Gutekunst figured Green Bay’s second cluster would be gone. The Bills beat out the Packers for the 16th pick, and Derwin James falling to the Chargers meant Los Angeles had no interest in moving 17. That left Seattle, and motivated-to-move GM John Schneider, a former Gutekunst co-worker.

And even though Gutekunst was ahead of Schneider in the draft order earlier in the week, the two had talked conceptually of Seattle’s desire to move down, since they didn’t have second or third-round picks. So that groundwork was in place, and with Alexander—who would’ve been a consideration at 14, had they stuck—there for the taking, the Packers were ready to go back up. They just had to work out the price.

“You go through all those things, look at all the historical data that tells you what that kind of trade would garner,” Gutekunst said. “One of our analytical guys, I just turned to him and said, ‘What do you think we need to do to get back into this range?’ He gives me that, and that’s where we go from. And obviously if there’s teams that don’t have as many picks in that area, they’re probably more willing.”

Earlier in the offseason, the Packers telegraphed their need for corners to play in new coordinator Mike Pettine’s defense with the offer sheet tendered to Chicago’s Kyle Fuller. As it turned out, they came away with two—Alexander and Iowa’s Josh Jackson, a pick that was possible because Gutekunst was able to emerge from his trade back up with the team’s second-round pick. And they have two first-round picks in ’19.

With the smoke clear now, Gutekunst says his ability to pull that off was, in large part, thanks to the good luck he had to work with guys he knew well, like Sullivan and Wojciechowski, which is a luxury that few first-year GMs get. That allowed for a smooth working operation that could adjust on the fly when trading up came off the table at 14, and then went back on the table at 27.

And it also was nice to have Thompson alongside, who offered his protégé three words after the Alexander pick was made: “Nice job, kid.”

“If you know him, he’s kinda understated,” Gutekunst says. “So that meant a lot.” 

https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/05/03/josh-rosen-arizona-cardinals-draft-mmqb-albert-breer

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1 hour ago, ChaRisMa said:

Gutekunst talked to the Saints during the week, and the conversation got more serious with two calls Thursday, with New Orleans asking what it would take to get to 14. But for the deal to come together, two things would need to happen. First, the players from the Packers’ first cluster would have to be gone, with any trade-up attempts having failed. Second, Davenport would have to be there.

Think this is the most interesting bit from this. If I'm reading this right it means that the Packers had an elite tier - and both James and Edmunds both fell outside of it. I'm sure this is a sentiment that many will disagree on. If both those were left out, I wonder who was the last player to go that would make the cut? There's no way of knowing of course - logically it would be Fitz, but then again logically Derwin woulda been in that tier - so who knows

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12 minutes ago, chillparsi1 said:

Think this is the most interesting bit from this. If I'm reading this right it means that the Packers had an elite tier - and both James and Edmunds both fell outside of it. I'm sure this is a sentiment that many will disagree on. If both those were left out, I wonder who was the last player to go that would make the cut? There's no way of knowing of course - logically it would be Fitz, but then again logically Derwin woulda been in that tier - so who knows

Sure makes you wonder.  I also wonder if Edmunds or James had not been picked up by the 18th pick if Gute would’ve grabbed one of them instead?  No way of knowing for sure, but if neither were in Gute’s “elite” list, then probably not.

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Looking at how the draft fell out, I don't think Fitzpatrick was a target. He was still on the board at the 11th pick, so if the Packers really wanted him they would have moved up - it was only three places. Of course they would have had to persuade Arizona (10th) or Miami (11th) to move down, but that doesn't quite fit with him (Gute) saying they were interested in trading up AT FIRST, until the guys they wanted were taken (which suggests the guys they wanted went a few picks earlier).

Given how they drafted, that suggests Ward (went 4th) and possibly Roquan Smith (went 8th) were the alternatives to Alexander and Burks, as the type of players that Pettine obviously wanted to craft his defense..

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On 5/3/2018 at 10:57 PM, chillparsi1 said:

Think this is the most interesting bit from this. If I'm reading this right it means that the Packers had an elite tier - and both James and Edmunds both fell outside of it. I'm sure this is a sentiment that many will disagree on. If both those were left out, I wonder who was the last player to go that would make the cut? There's no way of knowing of course - logically it would be Fitz, but then again logically Derwin woulda been in that tier - so who knows

It's pretty safe to say based on those comments the Packers had a clear top tier of defenders, probably include Chubb, Ward, and Fitzpatrick.  They had the opportunity to take both Edmunds and James, and opted to move down.  Shows that they were in that second tier as was Jaire Alexander.

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