We all know how impressive what the Green Bay Packers did last season was. An extremely young team, with a first-year starting quarterback in Jordan Love, went to the playoffs, beat the Dallas Cowboys and gave the San Francisco 49ers all they could handle in the divisional round.
And another stat shows us exactly how high the Packers' ceiling is in 2024 and beyond. According to Jason Fitzgerald, from Over the Cap, Green Bay's 90-man roster has 57 players with two or fewer seasons of NFL experience, which is first in the NFL. No other team is above 50, and the league average is 37.
In 2023, the Packers became the youngest roster in 54 years to reach the postseason. This year, Green Bay has the youngest (25.3) and second least expensive ($204.13 million) team in football.
That's a big point of analysis for the Packers. It can be a problem, as was exposed in the first half of last season, with a steep learning curve. But it can also be a big solution, because the ceiling for these players is extremely high.
"It was really hard," quarterback Jordan Love recently said about getting into the playoffs with such a young team. "It's been a whole process that we've had to grow together and continue to get everybody on the same page and work through the errors and things that weren’t looking as pretty early on. It's been a process."
Plan
Youth is not an accident, it's a plan for the Green Bay Packers. Since trading Aaron Rodgers to the New York Jets last year, general manager Brian Gutekunst has made a concerted effort to acquire younger players.
That's part of the explanation for the Packers moving on from running back Aaron Jones to sign Josh Jacobs, who's three years younger, in free agency. The other big signing was safety Xavier McKinney, a 24-year-old defensive player.
The addition of 11 new draft picks and 10 undrafted rookies creates a sense of internal competition, which only makes each individual better.
"You're going to have an opportunity," Gutekunst mentioned last year. "Just because someone was drafted ahead of you, or may have been here for the previous years, doesn't mean you're not going to get an opportunity to make the squad. We don't have a traditional owner, that may have something to do with it, as well. So, maybe we're able to make those decisions a little easier."
It's still a process, and it might not be a linear growth. But the Green Bay Packers put themselves in position to be competitive for years to come.
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