Acme Packing Company
One of the things I continue to keep hammering, ever since ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that the Green Bay Packers holdup with head coach Matt LaFleur isn’t his performance but his cost, is that the Packers run a cheap shop when it comes to coach pay. Why am I doing this? Because I hear it almost every year. If I hear the Darren Rizzi low-ball story one more time from an agent representing coaches, I might explode.
But, for some of you, these anecdotes seem to be convincing enough. I asked a source how to better paint the picture of the Packers’ lack of funding for the coaching staff (since there is no database of coaching salaries), and he told me to compare Green Bay’s coaching experience to other playoff teams. So, I ran those numbers for you, all by hand. You’re welcome.
The way the Packers have worked, for a long time, is that when someone is promoted out of a job, they try to fill the role internally. They will look to the outside and spend when they make several misfires in a row (like the hiring of Rich Bisaccia after several special teams coordinator flubs or the addition of DeMarcus Covington after bombing back-to-back defensive line hires), but their instinct is not to spend at the position (they made an internal promotion at linebackers coach this year when they lost Anthony Campanile to the Jacksonville Jaguars on a defensive coordinator promotion, for example).
Here’s another one of those anecdotes again: Take the Packers’ replacement for Jason Vrable, who was promoted from receivers coach to passing game coordinator in 2024. Did Green Bay search the globe and run an extensive search to find their next receivers coach? No, they hired their assistant offensive line coach (the guy who gets coffee for the offensive line coach), Ryan Mahaffey, to the position.
That’s sort of par for the course right now with the Packers. They’re a draft and develop team that isn’t supporting much of that development.
That’s why, whatever you do with head coach Matt LaFleur (sincerely, make a decision and stick to it, understand the cap timeline of the roster, but build up a good assistant staff), my biggest problem with the organization right now isn’t the man at the top so much as the funding for all of the other guys underneath him.
Hopefully, some of these numbers I’m about to list will open your eyes.
First, I want to look at all of the on-field coaches (this is really a college football term, but I’m short of a better phrase) and their experiences outside of their current organizations as on-field coaches. We’ll define on-field coaches as coordinators or true positional assistants. For example, we’ll count a defensive line coach as a positional assistant but not the assistant defensive line coach (the guy who gets the defensive line coach coffee).
We will also include the title senior assistant, as it makes sense in this context. A good...
