Acme Packing Company
Eric Stokes? OK, sure, Eric Stokes.
The Green Bay Packers have few big names among the group of players who are set to become unrestricted free agents in 2025, but several important role players. The tough question facing Green Bay is all about which role players were truly important, which still have some potential for development, and which can be safely cast aside.
Today we look at Eric Stokes, the disappointing former first-round draft pick who hasn’t touched a football while playing defense in three seasons.
41 Tackles (29 Solo), 0 FF 0 PD, 0 INT, 0 TFL, 0…it’s just like, all 0s really.
128 Tackles (98 Solo), 0 FF, 14 PD, 1 INT, 1 TFL
When baseball teams are drafting players, they always have a decision to make between higher upside young high school players, and more certain, but more fully formed college players. Drafting the best available college bat was one of the surest things you could do in the 2000s, and if you needed a player who would probably be a major league contributor within three seasons or fewer (like, for example, Kris Bryant), it wasn’t a bad idea. But, while college can be a relatively safe haven of projectability, you tend to find truly high upside guys (Mike Trout, for instance) when picking from the high school ranks. You will also bust more.
Football is very different from baseball, but philosophically, the Packers love going for upside in the first round rather than the safer bet of a more polished player who might step into the starting lineup more quickly and easily. This is at least partially because they are perennially so successful that they almost never draft in the top half of the first round, but the non-QBs in the top ten are often great athletes who are ALSO polished players. Once we get into the 20s, NFL teams have to make harder calls, sacrificing some polish for some athleticism, or vice versa.
Almost every recent Packer pick is something of a high-RAS project player. Jaire Alexander (9.53), Rashan Gary (9.95), Darnell Savage (only an 8.37, but brought down by his small size and ran a blistering 4.36 40-yard dash), Quay Walker (9.63), Devonte Wyatt (9.59), Lukas Van Ness (9.39), and Jordan Morgan (9.25) were all among the most athletic players remaining on the board when the Packers made their selections. It’s clear that Green Bay prefers to gamble on upside early in the draft, for better or worse.
If you’re thinking that every team probably does this, I can assure you that is not the case. For instance, the Vikings have selected Laquon Treadwell (3.33), Mike Hughes (7.44), Jeff Gladney (6.13), Christian Darrisaw (no combine, and to be fair, I think Darrisaw is an exceptional athlete, but we did not have the numbers at the time), and Jordan Addison (5.94). The Vikings have picked phenomenal athletes as well, like Garrett Bradbury...
