Acme Packing Company
Investing way too much time and energy into a question nobody is asking.
Sometimes I fixate way too intensely on something and let it take over my life. You’re about to experience one of those times.
Just to anticipate a few remarks right off the bat: Yes, I have too much time on my hands. No, I don’t have a life. Yes, this is very much offseason content, maybe even peak offseason content. Yes, it is a slow news day. Yes, this is very stupid. I’m going to write about it anyway because I embrace the answer to all of those previous questions.
With that out of the way — what’s the deal with the listed heights on the Packers’ roster?
I came to this topic because I was initially going to write an equally silly piece about the superlatives on the current Packers roster: who’s the tallest, the shortest, the oldest, the youngest, and so on. But I noticed there are four players who are listed at the exact same height of 6 feet, 7 inches on the roster, which made me wonder if I could figure out who is exactly the tallest.
Offensive linemen Kadeem Telfort and Brent Banks and tight ends Messiah Swinson and John FitzPatrick are the four horsemen of the tallpocalypse in this scenario, so I went hunting for the closest thing to official measurements I could get: combine and pro day heights, as listed on their respective Relative Athletic Score cards or in Dane Brugler’s massive draft tome for each player’s given year. And having done that research, I’m pleased to report that Telfort is the tallest of them all, measuring 6 feet, 7 ½ inches, which is an eighth of an inch taller than Banks and Swinson and half an inch taller than FitzPatrick.
Case closed, right? Well, yes, but actually no. Now I was rolling, and I had to know how the official measured heights of every player on the roster, because that would help me answer one crucial question: is anyone lying about how tall they are?
And the answer to that question is yes. But it goes much deeper than that.
For official roster listings, the NFL has an easily discernible rounding formula: for players measuring a half inch or less above a given inch (Kadeem Telfort at 6-7 ½, for instance), they round their heights down. For players measuring ⅝ of an inch or more above a given inch, they round their heights up. Ben Sims gets a ⅜ inch boost because of this, jumping up from 6-4 ⅝ to 6-5. And let’s be honest, Sims is already telling everybody he’s 6-5 anyway.
Disregarding everybody who falls within those parameters, we find three significant height discrepancies. Micah Robinson, Rasheed Walker, and Arron Mosby are all listed an inch or more above their measured height. Robinson got the biggest boost, jumping from 5-10 ⅞ to an even 6-0. Score one for the short kings out there, Micah. I know you’re...
