Acme Packing Company
We’re getting close to the end of our roster preview series. Today, we’re going to tackle the Green Bay Packers’ cornerback room, a lightning rod for Packers fans.
If you want to read any of our previous installments before we take you through every single cornerback on Green Bay’s 91-man roster, though, here are our breakdowns of Green Bay’s other position rooms:
What more can we say about Keisean Nixon at this point? Going into Year 4 as a starter for the Packers, fans have already made their minds up about who Nixon is, one way or another.
My opinion: Nixon is an average-ish outside cornerback in basically any metric that matters (passer rating allowed is a goofy stat and you should ignore it), but fans want a better “CB1” than Nixon. The truth is that Green Bay, as an institution, has pretty much played cornerbacks on one side of the field for my entire lifetime, so there’s never really a CB1-CB2 dynamic as much as there is a left corner-right corner dynamic.
Personally, I think Nixon’s cheap contract ($6 million per year, roughly in the ballpark of what linebacker Isaiah McDuffie is getting to be a backup and special teamer) has been a massive net positive for the team. With that being said, I, like basically everyone else, would like to see Nixon matched up with a better outside cornerback opposite of him than he’s seen over the past couple of years.
So far in practices, there’s been a rotation of cornerbacks opposite of Nixon in practices this spring and summer, but Nixon has been a mainstay in the starting lineup.
Over three years, former seventh-round pick Carrington Valentine has made 30 starts in the NFL. For where he was drafted, that’s a positive, but there are certainly weaknesses in his game.
While he’s only 24 years old, Valentine has generally started seasons coming off the bench, only for worse coverage players to get replaced by Valentine down the stretch of the year. When Valentine does eventually win a starting job, though, we end up being reminded about how he’s a pretty light cornerback who has trouble getting off blocks.
For example, Valentine played a screen extremely poorly against the Philadelphia Eagles in the 2024 playoffs, one reason why the Packers lost that game. In late 2025, Green Bay tried to rotate Nate Hobbs and Kamal Hadden in on run downs for Valentine to try to fit the run better, before both Hobbs and Hadden went down with injuries.
I think Valentine is in the driver’s seat right now for the other starting outside cornerback job, simply because he’s the incumbent, but there’s going to be plenty of competition at the position after the moves Green Bay has made this offseason.
The Packers seem to be getting their young rookies more involved...
