Acme Packing Company
Cliff Christl writes about the circumstances of a crazy Packers rumor from the late 1980s.
There’s no debate: the Packers bungled the 1989 NFL Draft.
Four players picked in the top five that year went on to Hall of Fame careers. Troy Aikman, taken first by the Cowboys, won three Super Bowls before later haunting Packers fans from various NFL broadcast booths. Barry Sanders, who went third to the Lions, had a storied career that saw him finish second all-time on the NFL career rushing leaderboards (though he was later passed by both Emmit Smith and Frank Gore). Derrick Thomas and Deion Sanders, who went fourth and fifth, both lit it up as impactful defenders for the Chiefs and Cowboys, respectively.
Only Tony Mandarich, whom the Packers took second overall, failed to make it in the NFL.
That draft could have played out any number of ways; had they lost their last game in 1988, the Packers would have held the first overall pick and may have taken Aikman. But some fans have spent the nearly 40 years since pining for Barry Sanders, dreaming in part of pairing him with Brett Favre, who would arrive in Green Bay just a few years later.
And maybe they would have done that…if they’d attended his workout in Stillwater, Oklahoma ahead of the draft.
Sanders was a late entry into the 1989 class, given a special exemption by commissioner Pete Rozelle to enter as a junior — it wasn’t until 1990 that juniors got blanket permission to enter the draft. Due to his late entry, nobody had firm testing numbers on Sanders, the diminutive but insanely productive player who’d just won the Heisman trophy.
That led to a private workout in Oklahoma on April 12, 1989, one the Packers may have just flat-out missed.
According to an oral history by official Packers historian Cliff Christl, the Packers sent scout Bobo Cegelski to watch Sanders work out. But Cegelski, in just his second year with the organization, may have missed all or part of the show.
It’s not entirely clear if he missed all or part of Sanders’ performance, but nobody on the scene remembers him being there, though an Associated Press wire report published in The Daily Oklahoman says the Packers had representatives on the scene.
Why? Nobody seems completely sure, but it former Packers general manager Ron Wolf told Christle it may have been because Cegelski had recently gotten a new dog and needed to take care of it the morning of the workout.
That’s right: the Packers may have missed out on drafting Barry Sanders because of a dog.
Now, the Packers were pretty set on Tony Mandarich. There’s plenty of evidence that suggests he was always their man. Maybe that’s an entirely different organizational problem, but you can see the thinking. The Packers were a moribund franchise and building up the offensive line with a generational prospect isn’t a terrible idea. It’s just that the generational prospect in question was...
