What is the secret to Green Bay's success?

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What is the secret to Green Bay's success? image

What is the secret to the Green Bay Packers ongoing success?

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Answer by Jeremy ArnoldFan of the game and unrepentant cheesehead

My day has come! What a delicious question.

Full disclosure: I'm a daily reader of the 'Ask Vic' column on Packers.com and I'm stealing most of my answer from my recollection of his insights.
 

  1. They focus on the playoffs, not championships. You can't win the SuperBowl in September. The Packer's internal goal is getting into the playoffs every year. From there, it's just a matter of which team gets hot at the right time (Three of the last four SuperBowl winners went 10-6 or worse in the regular season, and went on to go a collective 11-for-11 on the road, with underdog status in 10 of those games). This philosophy has a huge impact on how they manage free agency and player health.

  2. "Take care of the cap, and the cap will take care of you."  There's a very short list of GMs in the NFL that do as good of a job in managing the cap as Ted Thompson. His secret? Fanatical discipline when it comes to paying his players based on their assessed value. He'll let anyone walk if the money isn't right. As we saw last year with Raji and Kuhn, they often explore free agency and end up coming back. Unlike teams like Denver or Dallas, they'll never mortgage their future to chase a championship in a given season. They're all about maximizing their overall championship window. When they do dip into free agency, they're very selective and generally very cheap.

  3. Prospects + patience = players. As Christopher VanLang pointed out, the Packers have had incredible success with their "draft and develop" strategy. They give their prospects a chance to become. Nick Perry and Mike Daniels are great examples. Many will point out that the philosophy behind this approach is actually in the organization's DNA. The Packers are the only community-owned pro sports team in North America. This means that they aren't accountable to the whims of a mercurial ownership group desperate to sell tickets. They can afford to take the long view. It's no coincidence that McCarthy is the 4th-longest tenured head coach in the league (and two of the guys above him are on very shaky ground). They also have the second-longest tenured defensive coordinator.

  4. They choose value over need. Most GMs will cite their general allegiance to the "best player available" drafting methodology, but few stick to it. Ted Thompson has been ridiculously good at maximizing the value of his picks. Did GB need a QB when it drafted Rodgers? No. But he was the best player on the board. Thompson has also shown a knack from profiting from the over-zealousness of others. In his first four drafts alone, using the Approximate Value metric, his trades netted the Packers the equivalent of two first-round picks (a first and seventh overall) for nothing*.

  5. They got lucky. They got two franchise players (Rodgers and Matthews) in the late part of the first round (24th and 26th). Thompson recognized that both were undervalued, but I don't think even the most optimistic analyst could have guessed how good they'd be.


* See this excellent Grantland article: The Tree of Thompson.

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