GREEN BAY, Wis. -- For nine years, anyone who sat near Ron Wolf during an NFL game would come away entertained -- if not a little shocked -- by some of the things that came out of his mouth.

As the Green Bay Packers' general manager, Wolf would sit in the press box at road games, one row behind the media members who covered his team. And an NFL press box, as everyone is reminded in a weekly pregame announcement, is a working environment where no cheering or excessive noise is allowed.

Still, there was the game at Soldier Field in 1997, when one of Wolf’s players was injured and play was stopped. Wolf broke the silence when he blurted out, “drag his ass off the field, and let’s play the game.”

Or the time in Detroit during the 1993 NFC wild-card game, when George Teague returned an interception 101 yards for a touchdown. With each stride down the field, Wolf, as legend has it, uttered the words “shove it up their ass” over and over for as long as it took the NFL safety to run the length of the field.

These days, Ted Thompson -- the Packers' executive vice president, general manager and director of football operations -- sits in that same chair. Yet there are more words in his title than anyone hears him speak at any given game.

“Ron Wolf was a beauty,” said Thompson, the former Wolf scout who would sit near him during games and who took over as GM in 2005. “I’m probably a little bit less vocal about it.”

That goes for more than just during games.

The last time anyone heard from Thompson in a formal setting came Aug. 30, in his final news conference of training camp. League rules say NFL general managers must talk to the media regularly during the preseason, but there are no such requirements during the regular season.

"For the team to recover and do what they’ve done," reticent Packers GM Ted Thompson said of his NFC title game-bound outfit, "is an astronomical feat in my opinion," Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA TODAY NETWORK

Since then, the Packers have been on a wild ride. On Nov. 20, after a loss at Washington, the Packers stood at 4-6 and owned a four-game losing streak that had people calling for Thompson to fire coach Mike McCarthy or team president Mark Murphy to fire Thompson (and McCarthy). Now, they’re on an eight-game winning streak that has them in Sunday’s NFC Championship Game at the Atlanta Falcons.

So what does Thompson think of it all?

“When you’re on a losing streak, especially in my job, you have your own little personal misery all the time because -- it’s not that the team was underachieving or anything -- that’s just the way it is in the NFL,” Thompson told ESPN.com this week in a rare in-season interview. “For the team to recover and do what they’ve done is an astronomical feat, in my opinion.”

In Thompson speak, that’s about as flamboyant as it gets.

“Very consistent, just as I think you would recognize [from] the time you had to spend with him during training camp,” McCarthy said when asked about Thompson’s approach. “So very steady, very disciplined in his approach. Nothing really changes, nothing really rattles Ted. So he's a great boss, and he keeps everything running in the middle of the road.”

It’s as though Thompson follows McCarthy’s “boring by design” mentality.

Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

The one thing Thompson says he strives to be is positive even if inside he’s feeling that “personal misery.”

“He’s not a man of many words, but he always has a positive attitude,” Packers veteran guard T.J. Lang said. “He’s always got a smile on his face. You can definitely tell that any time the guy at the top -- the leader of your team -- feels that way about your team, it definitely rubs off on the guys.”

Thompson, who has been around Lambeau Field more this year because he has cut back his fall college-scouting schedule, said he went out of his way to keep that approach this season.

“If after the Washington game, everywhere I go in the building I’m scowling, I’m not helping anything,” Thompson said. “I’m not saying my attitude is going to change the world, but it’s part of the equation, I think.”

As usual, he did all that behind the scenes.

However, he could have taken some of the heat off his highly successful coach, who at the time was facing unprecedented criticism from fans and media. When that was suggested to him this week, Thompson essentially deemed a public vote of confidence in McCarthy unnecessary even though there was no doubt a long list of unfulfilled interview requests seeking just such a statement.

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“Why interject something that’s not in the minds of anybody in the building?” Thompson said. “It’s somewhere out there in Neverland, where somebody’s dreamed up something down in the basement of their mom’s house.”

When asked if McCarthy’s job was ever actually in jeopardy, Thompson said: “I would never comment on that.” But when asked if such an important decision would ever be based on a single season, he said: “No, we’ve been at this for a while. This is not our first rodeo.”

Thompson turned 64 this week, and while he’s under contract through the 2018 season, no one in the organization has said how much longer he intends to keep at it. Thursday’s news that Thompson’s chief lieutenant, Eliot Wolf, signed a new contract to remain with the Packers after he interviewed for the San Francisco 49ers' GM job keeps the possibility open that Ron Wolf’s son will be Thompson’s eventual successor.

Perhaps Thompson would retire if the Packers win it all this year. But if they do beat the Falcons on Sunday and make it to Super Bowl LI, it’s a good bet Thompson will celebrate, quietly, in the Georgia Dome press box.

“I have to,” Thompson said. “They make that announcement; there’s no cheering in the press box.”