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Great read http://www.jsonline.com/sports/pack...on-packers-chances-b99552947z1-321160041.html
Ted Thompson turned 62 in January and is now several months older than Ron Wolf was in February 2001 when he abruptly retired at the same age.
Thompson, however, is plunging full-barrel into another year looking refreshed and eager for his record-setting 11th season as general manager of the Green Bay Packers.
Other than owners-de facto general managers Jerry Jones in Dallas and Mike Brown in Cincinnati, just three others have served as NFL GMs with their present teams longer than Thompson.
The list includes Bill Belichick in New England, Ozzie Newsome in Baltimore and Mickey Loomis in New Orleans.
Thompson enters the second year of a long-term contract with a salary that Packers President Mark Murphy said ranks "right near the top" of GMs.
"The challenge there is, Bill Belichick is a GM and the head coach," added Murphy. "How do you count that?"
In April, one NFL personnel man said of Thompson's heavy scouting workload, "He's an animal. He's out there fixing and changing tires, man. There's not too many GMs doing what this guy's doing. That guy's going to be hard to replace when he walks out of there."
In an interview Saturday with the Journal Sentinel's Bob McGinn, Thompson had a lot on his mind, but retirement wasn't one of them. The Packers are favored by some oddsmakers to win the Super Bowl, and the ever-cautious Thompson likes what he has seen 10 days into training camp.
Q.Part of scouting is comparing the players on your team to the players on every other team. Would you rate the Packers' current personnel close to if not the best in the National Football League?
A.I don't really do that. I pay attention to our team more than I do the other teams. We pay attention to our divisional rivals. To try to rate our talent, our players, over all the rest of the teams I think would be a little bit self-serving.
Q. The reason I ask is an increasing number of sports books now have the Packers favored to win the 50th Super Bowl. How do you like being the favorite, or the hunted, so to speak?
A.I don't think I can talk about sports books. I think it's illegal ... if fans think we're going to win the Super Bowl, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if people think we're going to lose all our games. It hasn't been told yet.
Q.You know what it takes to win the Super Bowl, having scouted for a title team in 1996 and having built another in 2010. Is there any reason as we sit here today for you to doubt the Packers' capability to be there in late January or February?
A.I think if we can stay together and stay healthy, and play well every week, we'll have a chance. I think that's all you can ask for in this business. I've said this before. To predict who's going to be the Super Bowl champion is fool's gold. Do I think we have a chance to be a competitive team? Yes, I think we have a chance.
Q.Will you ever be able to get over that playoff defeat in Seattle?
A.I'm over. There's parts of it you never get over. I'm never going to get over the loss to Denver in the Super Bowl. But you have the win (Super Bowl XXXI) in New Orleans and the win in Dallas (XLV). So everything works itself out, you know?
Q.You've experienced many losses, both as a player and as a scout, but was it the toughest loss of your career?
A.I don't know. They're all tough. When you lose you're just miserable. I've had some doozies. As a member of the Seahawks we played in Baltimore one year (2003) and we were up three or four touchdowns. Ron (Wolf) had come, he was retired by then, and sat in the press box with me. He takes off like in the middle of the third quarter to beat the crowd because this game's over with. And all of a sudden the ball starts bouncing. It literally bounced off of a guy's helmet and the other team catches it and runs with it. The ball bounces off the back of the quarterback's jersey. All kinds of stuff. It was a regular-season game. It wasn't a playoff game. But it was just a horrible thing to see because you could see it coming. There was a certain amount of dread. That was horrible (44-41 overtime loss).
Q.At the Super Bowl, Seahawks quarterbacks coach Carl Smith told me the Seahawks were just grasping at straws and grab-bagging on offense as the game wore on against a Green Bay defense that was dominating. In the final analysis, what stays with you? Why was that game lost?
A.We're moving on. It's football. It's athletics. It's the same reasoning that I lost in a T-shirt league game back in Atlanta, Texas, when I was on the Cowboys team. We were undefeated and we were playing to be 10-0 and that was the last game of the season, and we lost. I remember crying in the dugout. There's no crying in baseball, but my dad jumped my tail because he didn't want me crying in the dugout. But sports, athletics, it's what it's all about.
Q.Do you think the painful memories of that afternoon will prove to be harmful, helpful or neither for the Packers of 2015?
A.I don't think either. There's nothing needed for me.
Q.Based on your lifetime in football, would be it more difficult for the Packers to recover from losing a 16-0 lead late in the third quarter of the NFC Championship Game or the Seahawks to recover from losing on the final play of the Super Bowl?
A.On the Seahawks' thing, they got issues and we've got ours. As far as our thing, we're past that.
Q.After a devastating collapse like the one in Seattle, what was your short-term and long-term course of action as GM?
A.You won't leave this alone. It's going about your business, starting to get ready for the draft and free agency. Prioritize what you want to do, what you need to do. Once your season's over, you go to the next thing.
Q.Your friend and mentor, Ron Wolf, managed to win one Super Bowl in his nine seasons with Brett Favre at quarterback. Would you be disappointed in yourself if the Packers were to win just the one Super Bowl with Aaron Rodgers?
A.Well, you can't take those things lightly. Those are hard to get. We've gotten one with Aaron as quarterback and we've been in the hunt to try to get once since then. Hopefully, we can stay in the hunt. If you stay in the hunt and give yourself a chance, that's all you can ask. You can say finish and do all that, but there's always other people trying to finish. It's a hard business.
Q.In seven seasons as starter Rodgers owns a 6-5 playoff record and one championship. Are you eager for him to elevate his performance in the playoffs after his mediocre play in elimination games the last four years against the Giants, the 49ers twice and the Seahawks?
A.I'm fine with Aaron's play. I don't think it's mediocre.
Q.We're here talking about the roster you've assembled as possibly being the best in a sport that's No. 1 in America. Yet, you often come across as so flat, almost blasé about it. Where does the joy in your life come from, both professionally and personally?
A.My joy comes from family and friends, and my relationship with God. I put a lot of stock in transferring worries and that sort of thing over to His work.
Q.What drives you to put in the hours and the travel time? It can't be money. Is it accolades, thrill of the chase, camaraderie, fun, your legacy?
A.It's all those things. It's what we do, it's what scouts do. I don't do as much scouting as I used to. I'm not on the road quite as much. Mostly because all my young guys want to get out on the road. It's not like we're staying in dumps. We stay in pretty good hotels. We get rental cars. We don't have to walk. Scouting's not the hardest thing in the world. I enjoy the chase because you always hope you'll find the guy nobody knows about. You sit in a room. Sometimes you have friends that scout for other teams there in the room with you. You're talking about things, family, what's going on in your life. You've got to be able to sit in a meeting room at a college like the University of Texas and have (scouting legend) C.O. Brocato school you in terms of how to do your job to really appreciate this.
Q.Wolf was 62 when he abruptly up and quit largely because he felt he had lost that critical edge. You're also 62. Have you lost any of your fastball? How many more years can you see yourself doing this?
A.I can't speak for Ron. He might have just been thinking up something so he could get out. There are times you think about getting out, doing something else. This is kind of like family for me. Like I said, I enjoy the scouting part of it. I enjoy the preparation for draft time. I enjoy the tit and tat in free agency. Planning out where we're going to be this time next year. Most everybody right this second is thinking about the first preseason game or the first regular-season game. I'm thinking about beyond that, and I enjoy that kind of thinking.
Q.On offense, you have a superstar quarterback, a bruising young franchise running back, a terrific offensive line, a superb corps of wide receivers and two competitive tight ends. How good does the unit look? Do you see any holes?
A.Yeah, they've got a chance to be pretty good. It's way too early. From a talent and personnel standpoint you can't think like that. You have to think, "We've got to get some more backups coming along. We need to have another one of these, another one of these. We've got to get these college free agents to come through, and one of them has to play this role or that role." We're not sitting around thinking, "Boy, look at us."
Q.You have had high praise for Mike McCarthy's play-calling over the years. Do you worry the offensive mix won't be as good without him in that role?
A.I've said that about Mike and his play-calling. I would say that I trust Mike, and always have, with this team and the way he wants to direct this team. Whether he's calling the plays or whether someone else is calling the plays and he does some other things and spreads himself out a little bit more, I trust his judgment to do the right thing.
Q.If the attack sputters, would you hesitate to suggest if not demand that McCarthy return to his former workload and resume calling the plays?
A.Should I scream, "The sky is falling, the sky is falling?" We don't go into stuff like that. We don't go into, "Well, what if it doesn't work?" There's all kinds of things that happen during the course of a year, a season, over the course of five or six years. Who knows? We don't go into it like that. We're assuming everything's going to be good. There's a reason why he's doing these things. Some of them are his reasons. We've talked about it. I trust him with this team.
Q.When push came to shove in March, what convinced you to pay Randall Cobb and Bryan Bulaga what was necessary to keep them in Green Bay?
A.As always, we like to be able to keep our own. If we can develop our own and keep our own we like to do that. Those are prime examples of two guys that came in, played well, fit well in the locker room, good community guys. I don't know what else you would look for in guys you would want to keep on your team. We've tried that with other players. Sometimes we weren't able to keep them.
Q.This will be Dom Capers' seventh season as defensive coordinator. What kind of defense do you expect to field this year?
A.A good one. I think we have some interesting personnel. Dom is one of those guys that likes to tinker with personnel and use different groups and sub packages. It looks like, if we can stay healthy and catch a few breaks, that we'll have some versatility in that regard.
Q.Seattle, Dallas and Carolina, the other final four teams in the NFC last season, run the ball well. Is the Packers' run defense, a weakness in 2014 and for quite a few years before that, strong enough to hang with the top rushing teams?
A.Yes. I'm confident. When it's all said and done I think we'll trot a pretty good group out there.
Q.You played linebacker. What's the best way to utilize Clay Matthews?
A.Let him play. You can't say this about everybody and I hope I'm not exaggerating this, but he could literally play anywhere and he'd be really good. He's one of those extraordinarily gifted players. He's not only gifted from a physical sense, he's also gifted in the instinctive end. It's not a surprise that his dad was a 15-, 17-, 20-year player in the NFL. Yeah, he's a really good player. We knew that when we drafted him.
Q.Matthews sat out two fourth-quarter scoring drives in Seattle because of injury, then played in overtime and a week later in the Pro Bowl. Three Seahawk defensive backs kept playing with injuries that required surgery. Should Matthews have stayed on that field?
A.That's never even come up. We've never even thought about that. I don't even know what the injuries (were) or what kept him off. If you're suggesting someone on our team, in our locker room, would duck out of their responsibility, that's rude of you to ask that question.
Q.In January, McCarthy said, "Let's be real. We don't draft special team players." Has your drafting of players based much more on positional than special-teams performance contributed to the Packers ranking 30th overall in the kicking game from 2006-'14?
A.No. What Mike is saying is, we don't go after guys or draft them specifically for roles they might play on special teams. We do, in fact, draft tons of guys that play on special teams and are really good at it. Micah Hyde being one that jumps out at you. But they're all like that. You watch practice tonight, see how many are out there playing special teams.
Q.Brad Seely and Bobby April, two of the best special teams coaches in the last 20 years, were available in January but weren't even interviewed by the Packers. Would you have preferred that McCarthy talk to them or some other veteran coaches before simply promoting from within?
A.No, I wouldn't. I talked to Mike when there are times like that when we're making some changes. Again, I trust Mike with this team. I trust his judgment in making those kind of decisions.
Q.Do you think purging most of the core players, firing Shawn Slocum and promoting Ron Zook is a winning formula for significant improvement on special teams?
A.Again, I defer that to Mike and his ability to know what to do with the team.
Q.Mark Murphy, McCarthy and you all used the word disappointing regarding the arrests and/or suspensions of Letroy Guion, Andrew Quarless and Datone Jones. What have you personally done in the case of these three players to reduce the chances of more off-field incidents that can be so damaging to an organization?
A.Well, we're always working on that. The league as a whole works on that. We have seminars, we have meetings. Certainly we have conversations with players and express to them our thoughts on it. That's what we do.
Q.After 11 years with the same leadership it's impossible for a team not to take on the personality of the GM. Other than winning, what stamp of yours do you hope has been imprinted on the Packers?
A.Lord help us (laughter) ... I don't know that I've imprinted any kind of stamp on it. I've always tried to do things in an honest, forthright way and to lead in that regard. To ask for wisdom from up on high so that I can make the right decisions. What I'd like to leave here is people would say we did things the right way. And that's a lot easier said than done because there are traps along the way.
Q.Julius Peppers will be 36 in January and is being paid a lot more money this year, the second year of his contract. What's your guess on how much he has left?
A.I'm not going to speak to the dollars. He's a remarkably gifted athlete, and he looks good to me. So, so far, so good.
Q.Other than good fortune, what factors can be attributed to the dramatic decrease in injuries in the last 1½ years?
A.Have we had dramatic decrease in injuries? Seems like we have more injuries than you could throw a stick at. Seriously, you sit in my chair and everybody's hurt all the time. To answer your question, we've done physical, structural work in terms of building the (new) training-room facility down there. The hydrotherapy and things like that. We spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on diet and nutrition, strength and weightlifting. The stuff that Mike does on scheduling, nobody would have even dreamed an NFL team would do that five years ago. It's all about being repetitive as players. Being able to get back up and go to the next play. I think our players have an appreciation for it and have bought into it, especially on the nutrition side. Part of it's structured. We say, "Look, you're going to be in the weight room a certain amount of time and you're going to do this and this and this." The other part, when you're away from the building, it's overlooked sometimes but that's a big part of the players' ability to be reliable and durable. We're by no means perfect because it's hard to make it through a day without somebody getting nicked up.
Q.To what degree were the Packers interested in signing tight end Jermaine Gresham before he signed with Arizona in late July?
A.He's a guy we took a look at. I'm not going to talk about what the level of interest was.
