The Packers panopticon has turned to Phoenix, where Brian Gutekunst and Matt LaFleur spoke to the media in between work at the annual NFL owners meetings this week.
Mostly, you can ignore these updates. It’s usually a lot of happy talk and company-line talking points. We’re happy with our offseason so far, we’re going to try to do better this fall, we’re looking forward to the draft. You know the drill.
Occasionally, you’ll get bits of actual information, but most teams have become so good at working the media that these meetings are just another charade.
That’s how it goes in the modern NFL media landscape, unfortunately. Access to decision makers is increasingly rare, and those decision makers are increasingly media savvy. It leaves a lot of work to be done sorting through remarks and reading between the lines, which is how we get speculation about which player, exactly, might have been disgruntled during the season, and whether or not they were enough to swing the NFLPA survey toward a negative grade for Matt LaFleur.
It’s all a delicate dance of information, misinformation, truth, misdirection, and outright lies. That makes for some compelling offseason discussion, though, and with the NFL Draft still almost a month away, I guess that’s about as good as we can hope for.
Gutekunst weighed in on a bunch of stuff, including the surprising revelation that h[e’s had his eye on Zaire Franklin for a while](/green-bay-packers-news/81275/the-packers-tried-to-trade-for-zaire-franklin-in-the-past).
Players apparently didn’t like some of what Matt LaFleur was doing last year.
LaFleur should change his approach to avoid future low grades from his players.
LaFleur didn’t make big changes to his offensive coaching staff this offseason. Will that prove to be a mistake?
Despite myriad injuries last year, the Packers were in position to win a bunch of games — but failed to seal the deal.
This is, evidently, a world record, one that the man in question dedicated to his son, “Hurricane Thomas Buckingham.”