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Some people are fans of the Green Bay Packers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Green Bay Packers. This 2019 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.




Your team: STUPID FUCKING CALL!


Your 2018 record: 6-9-1, including a last-second miracle win against … C.J. Beathard. Like watching history unfold right before Joe Tessitore’s bugged eyes. The Packers also needed Aaron Rodgers to work his gimpy magic to pull out comeback wins against the Bears and the, uh, Jets. Plus they needed Daniel Carlson to blow a kick to salvage a tie at home against the Vikings, and Carlson merrily obliged them. In other words, 6-9-1 was the best-case final record for a season in which the Packers, in terms of both play and morale, collapsed like a nightclub on fire. They lost to Detroit after Mason Crosby blew five kicks. They lost to the Rams after Ty Montgomery ignored orders to take a knee in the end zone and subsequently fumbled away another chance for Rodgers to redeem the trash compactor of a roster surrounding him. They didn’t bother to make Aaron Jones the No. 1 back until November. They didn’t target Davante Adams nearly enough, and Rodgers wasn’t shy about voicing his displeasure with that fact. That Week 1 win against the Bears was their only victory against a team with a winning record. They got Rodgers hurt AGAIN.

This is the part where I disclose, as I do every year, that I am a Vikings fan. And so all of this served as orgasm fuel for yours truly. Yes, my team is a grease dumpster stationed outside a Long John Silver’s, but at least the Packers were somehow worse last season. They were exposed, like a beached whale carcass exploding after the noxious gases trapped within its corpus have forced their way out. This was the year that Mike McCarthy’s reign of huffy cowardice finally ended. Tyler Dunne over at Bleacher Report detailed all of the antiquated practices and petty bullshit that led to his overdue downfall in a story that I have since had tattooed, in full, on my back:

“Mike has a low football IQ, and that used to always bother Aaron,” this source says. “He’d say Mike has one of the lowest IQs, if not the lowest IQ, of any coach he’s ever had.”

You and I have known this ever since McCarthy called his first punt from an opponent’s 40, but to finally see it voiced by his own HOF quarterback is so, so gratifying. Like a really good trip to the therapist. It’s finally all out there! FEELS GREAT! Let’s all remember the massage thing while we’re at it:

About once a week, a meeting would start up and McCarthy was MIA... Eventually, word leaked that McCarthy, the one calling plays on game day, was up in his office getting a massage during those meetings.


Lotta surface area to cover for that poor physical therapist. Dunne also reported that longtime GM Ted Thompson used to fall asleep in meetings before he was kicked upstairs prior to last season. Whenever Thompson was awake, Kalyn Kahler at SI noted that he would draft horribly, blithely ignore promising trade overtures, and run the team like he was going off of focus group data from the DCCC:

Multiple sources noted the Packers’ low tolerance for “loud guys,” a general term for players who are outspoken with the media or even those who complain privately about the organization... The term “bad guy” was thrown around amongst team decision makers, a descriptor that could range from a guy with a sordid past, or just a player who talks too much.


Jesus Christ, even the New York Times deploys fewer racial euphemisms. As Dunne reported in great detail, Aaron Rodgers actually fits into all of that unwanted criteria. Almost as if the Packers have no fucking idea how to relate to modern players or manage them! Hard to believe, coming from a team whose signature calling card is bicycles at training camp. Sometimes they even cut practice short to take a pontoon boat ride to Eagle River!

Your coach: It’s former Titans assistant Matt LaFleur, whose offense ranked 25th in the league last season. Can’t remember the last time the Packers hired an unheralded offensive coordinator who presided over an underwhelming offense elsewhere! NO I CANNOT. LaFleur’s own OC will be Nathaniel Hackett, who was just run out of Jacksonville. Let’s see how Rodgers feels about finally having some fresh blood on the sidelines…

I don’t think you want to ask me to turn off 11 years (of recognizing defenses). We have a number of check-with-mes and line-of-scrimmage stuff. It’s just the other stuff that really not many people in this league can do. That’s not like a humblebrag or anything; that’s just a fact. There aren’t many people that can do at the line of scrimmage what I’ve done over the years.


Yeah no, he’ll be ignoring LaFleur by October. LaFleur tore his Achilles this offseason, by the way. The Packers can’t even keep their stupid coaches healthy.

Your quarterback: This team essentially wasted Aaron Rodgers’ prime, and now they’re going to spend the next five years pretending that he isn’t in decline. Rodgers was wise to treat old Beav’s desiccated offensive plans like toilet paper and usurp playcalling duties from the head coach whenever he felt like it. That’s your right when you’re one of the greatest quarterbacks who has ever lived. But, in every other way, he comes off as a moody and vindictive prick who nurtures grudges like they’re his own children, cuts off family members if they don’t have State Farm as an insurance provider, and freezes out anyone else on offense who doesn’t accept his word as law. Here was Rodgers sniping at Greg Jennings and Jermichael Finley when they dared to openly question his methods:

It bothers me that every time there’s an article, it’s the same two people… And if it’s not an article about me, do you ever hear their names anywhere else? At what point do you move on? You talk about me being sensitive and petty? At what point do you move on or stop telling the same stories?


Aaron Rodgers is NOT mad. He finds all this even more amusing than hate-watching his brother’s old episodes of The Bachelorette. Keep in mind that Finley nearly died on the field playing for the Packers, and Rodgers uses the time he visited Finley in the hospital after the fact as proof that Finley is now being disloyal to him:

At what point did J-Mike think I was a bad leader?… It couldn’t have been when I was at the hospital the night he broke his neck and spent a couple of hours with him.


I accept that, in order to be a successful NFL quarterback, you have to be insane. Lord knows that Tom Brady is. Scouts spend the entire combine making sure that you’re of suitably UNsound mind and thus eternally dedicated to their deadly sport. Dan Marino was a raging prick to his teammates all the time. I get all that. But Aaron Rodgers seems to have no grasp of the fine line between pushing your teammates and alienating them. When everyone else except you is a crazy dickhead, guess who’s the REAL crazy dickhead?

I love Mike McCarthy. He’s a great man. He’s got a huge heart. As far as a player to a coach, it’s just two Alpha males who are hyper-competitive and love winning and are both a little stubborn.


So true. You hear it. Sometimes one film room isn’t enough to hold all that man-itude. If you don’t think Rodgers will be pissed forever that he lost a stupid beer-chugging contest to one of his own linemen, well then you’re as naïve as the people who cheer for this shitheap of a team:


YEAH! BEER IS FOR PUSSIES, DAVE! Your backup is still DeShone Kizer. Have fun with that.

What’s new that sucks: FREE AGENTS! You signed actual free agents. Fucking WILD. Who knew such wheeling and dealing was possible in today’s NFL? Finally divested of both Thompson and McCarthy, Green Bay took the parking boot off their payroll and let GM Brian Gutekunst (whose name still sounds FILTHY) sign the likes of Billy Turner, Za’Darius Smith, Preston Smith, and Adrian Amos. Dom Capers isn’t around anymore to coach the latter three players in that crop, so that’s a nice bonus. But if you think the Packers are finished masquerading as some Mom-and-Pop general football store that’s just scraping by, allow team President Mark Murphy, a man who looks like the love child of Ron Howard and Clint Howard, to disabuse you of that hope:

“It was a unique year. We had some irregular expenses that affected our financial performance, but we’re still in a strong financial position.”


Those irregular expenses included the aforementioned free agents, new coaches, a contract extension that allows Rodgers to buy and replace God, and payments made into the NFL’s concussion settlement. Just one of those little quirks where Uncie Mark has to help buy the silence of dying former employees! Trust me when I tell you that the Packers will act quickly to make up for any losses incurred by those “irregularities.” They started already by cutting Mike Daniels and letting him quickly catch on with the Lions. Seems like everyone the Packers get rid of makes a point of staying within the division to face them twice a year. I wonder why that is.

Also, they fired this guy. The resulting XFL avatar makes it so much bleaker:


What has always sucked: I have despised the Packers my whole life. It doesn’t matter if Rodgers is the QB, or Brett Favre, or the Majik Man. It doesn’t matter if they’re coached by Mike McCarthy, or Mike Holmgren, or Mike Sherman, or Mike Greenberg, or some secondhand Rams intern who is somehow NOT named Mike. The faces change but what does not change is the insufferable aura of the whole enterprise. All these people are drunk on their own quaintness. Watching the Packers is like visiting a friend’s relative’s house. An old lady greets you at the door and kisses both your cheeks and offers you a cheese log studded with toasted walnuts and dried cranberries, and it all seems very nice. And then she tells you that MS-13 is coming to sexually assault her grandkids if we don’t do something about the foreigners.

I’ve been to Wisconsin. I also lived in the next state over for the bulk of my adolescence. You know all about how fake Minnesota people are, but Minnesotans are merely the most acute example of general Midwestern pod people, Wisconsinites included. Packers fans are nice for roughly 1.5 beers, and then they turn into human rebel flags. I’m surprised one of them didn’t hunt down Rodgers with a bow when he said nice things about Muslims. These are brainless fat slugs inflating our healthcare prices and sucking our cheese reserves dry. They bask in their whole bullshit “community” status not because they want to welcome you in, but because they want to cast you out. Packers Nation is a cul-de-sac of odd-smelling ranch style houses, each one uglier than the next, with a loaded handgun and a pan of gross-looking seven-layer dip on every table. I hope Green Bay gets hit with an asteroid.


Jimmy Graham has been washed up since 1996.

What might not suck: The fact that McCarthy is finally out on the curb is enough to convince most people the Packers will return to form and win the division. I am not one of those people, because fuck them.


HEAR IT FROM PACKERS FANS!

Luke:

After chasing human sized woodchuck Mike McCarthy off of the Lambeau sod with a rake, Mark Murphy turns around and hands the head coaching job to his paperboy.


Kurt:

So many of the fat fucks here still actually think they own the team.

Brendan:

Aaron Rodgers has a new coach to ignore!

Grant:

Leper colonies have a better survival rate than this team.

Nate:

My mother-in-law joined us for a Packers game a few years back. Before halftime ended, an obese, shirtless man sitting behind us vomited on her and then fell directly on top of her. The guy didn’t get kicked out.


Jon:

We have one of the greatest QBs of all time, and everyone here won’t stop bitching about how he doesn’t talk to his mom. She probably sucks.


Eric:

With every passing year, it becomes more and more agonizingly apparent 2014 was Aaron Rodgers’ last chance at a Super Bowl.


Ryan:

Aaron Rodgers will be 36 in December. The Packers will celebrate by going 7-9.

Ethan:

Aaron Rodgers had only two INTs last year and my dad thought it was like he was watching Brett fucking Hundley again.


Zach:

Because I’m perpetually delusional enough to believe the organization will go to and win the Super Bowl every year despite allowing a glorified gym teacher to squander a dynasty-potential prime of one of the most gifted players in NFL history.


Esteban:

The Packers “owners” are as evil, miserly and hateful as any actual owner of an NFL franchise, just with a lot less money.


Gregory:

Our color rush uniforms are white. The players look like tampons out there.

Grant:

The one epic playoff collapse the Packers weren’t involved in, our new head coach was.


Valerie:

I’m not sure even Aaron Rodgers could name his top three wide receivers, and I’m pretty sure I’ll still be doing roster-checks in the 3rd or 4th game of the season.


Graham:

The mere mention of the name Brandon Bostick makes me want to slam my own head in a car door.


Surgenova:

Even amongst family, I’ve steered conversations heading towards football to much more pleasant avenues, such as politics and colonoscopies. Keep in mind, I love the same team they do.


Katie:

We cut cable this year, so the Packers are a mortal lock to win the Super Bowl.

Tim:

A good friend of mine still believes we didn’t give Brett Hundley enough of a chance to show what he can do.


Lucas:

The Packers will either lose in the NFC Championship Game again or go 6-10 after Rodgers gets into a feud with our new boy wonder coach over playcalling in week 2.


James:

Maybe if this fucking team didn’t all decide to take turns on IR all year, they’d have a chance.


HJ:

Defense still remains a nice concept in Green Bay. I look forward to fans asking, “Is Clay hurt? I don’t see him out there,” while simultaneously demanding that Jordy Nelson be brought back.


Luci:

I have the Packers’ Bootylicious song from Pitch Perfect 2 set as my ringtone. I’m the worst. The only reasonable explanation for the last two seasons is that I had an aneurysm during halftime of the 2017 Packers/Falcons NFCCG, then died and went to hell.


Aaron (not Rodgers):

I have never been so happy to watch this team lose a football game as I was when they lost to the goddamn Cardinals and damned him to an eternity of yelling at high school referees. HE’S GONE AND I’M FREE!!!!!!


Steven:

They should have stacked up more Lombardi Trophies than screws in Rodgers’ shattered clavicle.


Khris:

I grew up in Wisconsin. Still live here. Every stereotype you’ve ever heard about the cheese-guzzling, beer-swilling, DUI-accumulating, Scott-Walker-voting, pasty white men and women of Wississippi, is apt.


Dylan:

Lucking into back-to-back generational QBs has turned me into such a fucking spoiled brat. I’m deathly afraid that the recent trend of mid-tier performance on the field is going to be the norm for a long time, and I guarantee I will be the most insufferable asshole about it. Fuck Brandon Bostick with a grainy photo of Brett Favre’s dick.

Sean:

The window is closed now. Rodgers hasn’t had a healthy year since Drew’s children were in diapers, there are no wide receivers left, and they still don’t have a running back. Last year wasn’t a mistake. It’s the new normal.


Alex:

We are second to the New England Patriots in first world problems in the NFL. Most things I could complain about will inevitably end in a “go fuck yourself” from other teams.


Eric:

Mark Murphy loves executive search firms to make every hire. Apparently there are tons of similarities in finding a CFO and finding a coach of a football team. The last time the Packers had this kind of reporting structure was the 1980s, a decade where they made the playoffs once. In a strike year.


David:

Looking forward to Rodgers getting pissed off at his receivers and taking a sack on 4th-and-3 on the last play of the game cause he doesn’t trust anyone.


Mark:

Rodgers is at a point where the whitewalkers that file into Lambeau on game day wait for him to screw up like throwing the ball away when everyone was covered to boo him because Favre would have done better.


Matt:

I will die on the hill that Aaron Rodgers is the greatest quarterback of all time. And what does he have to show for it? Being saddled with the stupidest motherfucker to ever walk an NFL sideline for over a decade, a lazy piece of shit who somehow managed to not even win funniest massage-related storyline of the offseason.


Daniel:

The worst part about this team is, has been, and will most likely continue to be the season ticket holders. In a system that has corrupted so terribly it makes Putin blush, these people have held on to their seats for years and will hand down to the next generation. This means almost every person at a game is either a third generation ticket holder or a non-season ticket holder that had to pay 5x the face value. I’ve never seen a group of people who show up to support their team at a game yet simultaneously seem to hate being at the game more than Packers season ticket holders. It’s like a 70,000 long DMV waiting line. You’re surrounded by baby boomers who treat going to games as if they’re attending a sacred pagan ritual and if you disturb it in anyway (stand up/clap/make any noise during anything other than a third and goal from the 5-inch line), then the crow god won’t bless us with a bountiful harvest.


Another Matt:

It took us thirteen years to fire a guy who would skip team meetings to get a massage (and he didn’t even get the full Robert Kraft).


(NOTE FROM DREW: How do you know he didn’t?)

Damir:

What is there to look forward to? Not seeing Mike McCarthy’s sausage fingering a run on 3rd and 6 only to punt the ball back aNd pLaY dEfEnSe. Cuts to Danica Patrick in the box as she watches wrecks on the field larger than the ones she caused at Daytona. How many Packers “fans” become Browns fans. How long LaFleur lasts before Aaron stops wearing the radio equipped helmet.


Joe:

The fans have some bizarre retro Stockholm Syndrome thing for McCarthy now. Green Bay fans were about to march on 1265 with pitchforks and torches because former-GM Ted Thompson wouldn’t spend money in free agency and now they want Gutey’s head because he went out and DID spend the money. When the team went tits up last year, the stands emptied out quickly. Don’t let anyone lie to you about that. The stadium fans are TOO polite and stay seated and quiet the whole game. I tried to high-five a few people around me last year after a TD and a lady asked me to sit down and stop being rowdy. Fuck you, lady. It’s like being in a cold, drunken library with uncomfortable metal benches.

Alex:

We have season tickets split amongst one side of the family. Every year, my Dad insists on getting the coldest weather games because “they’re the best games”. And every year without fail, we throw on our long Johns and make the drive north to sit between the two fattest fucks east of the Mississippi and get 12 dollar beer spilled on us for three hours. Only a Packers fan would insist that subzero temperatures would be the “ideal” environment for a game. Lambeau Field is the most overrated experience in professional sports.


Christian:

I am so fucking excited to watch Rodgers take passive aggressive shits on LaFleur’s face all season! Have you seen Aaron play guitar on the fucking beach? It’s like watching that asshole in college trying to get laid by playing John Mayer songs at the party. Eat shit, guitar guy!

PICTURED: Guitar guy

Danny:

In the last year, Wisconsinites were blessed with deep playoff runs from both the Brewers (lost in games 7 of the NLCS to the Dodgers) and the Bucks (Lost in Game 6 of the Easter Conference Finals to the Raptors). BOTH of those teams included a league MVP in Christian Yelich and Giannis Antetokounmpo. That’s two MVPs for one city in year, which is pretty cool. But if you look around town, you see all these fucking assholes tarnishing that by adding a third “MVP” onto t-shirts or whatever. Aaron Rodgers hasn’t been a MVP for like 5 years and he NEVER WILL AGAIN. His time has passed. Keep him out of this!


Dolly:

December 24, 2016: my mom, sister, brother-in-law and I all go to the Packers-Vikings game. We parked at my aunt’s friend’s house a few blocks away. We tailgated in her driveway and while tailgating, the people in the house next door were having a party and one of the guests apparently had to pee. Instead of going inside to use the bathroom, this 300+ lb. troglodyte just decided to unzip and pee against the side of the house. I just watched him answer nature’s call right then and there up against the side of the house. There is nothing to do in Green Bay other than watch the Packers. LITERALLY NOTHING!


Melvin:

I have been a Packers fan my entire life, and at 29, means I have led one of the most privileged sports fandoms anyone could ask for. Why then is watching games with my family so miserable? I have been conditioned by them to give up if the Packers are down by sevem points at any time during the game. If the opposing team ran back the opening kickoff for a score, my dad would threaten to turn the TV off and I still have the gut reflex built into me now. This past year my wife accepted a job in Green Bay which she only applied to because I was a Packers fan and she thought that Green Bay is a real city. It is not a real city. It’s like if somebody took your low-key racist suburb of 10,000 people at accidentally added another 0 on the end. There is nothing to do here other than drink. I finally got to go to my first ever game at Lambeau Field as Christmas present with my wife. Obviously we went in December as it was freezing rain on top of the snow that was already covering every inch of the bleachers. It was not a great experience and my wife is now terrified that I will make her go to a game again at some point and relive the horrible experience I put her through for no actual good reason because football is better on TV anyway. Both my parents and her parents want to come up for games this year.


Matt:

I was at a local waterpark (well, THE local waterpark) during the loss to the mighty Arizona Cardinals at Lambeau. The pool boy noticed I was monitoring the game on a TV through the window and periodically asked me for score updates during the game. When I told him the final score, he looked out the window towards Lambeau and said “McCarthy’s fucking gone.” Beav was of course completely stunned to be fired that very day. In other words, something that was blindingly obvious to even a pool boy making $9 an hour totally caught Beav off guard, which if you think about it is a perfect description of the last 10 years of the Rodgers era. The Rodgers Packers right now are basically the 1995 Marino Dolphins.


John:

Because the Packers surveyed the landscape, looked at all those “Do you know Sean McVay? You’re hired!” memes, and said “We’re not doing that, unless we can get him in a socially awkward, deer-in-the-headlights package.” That’s when Matt LaFleur knew it was his moment to shine. I swear to God, if I have to read one more sentence about the “relationship” between Matt LaFleur and Aaron Rodgers, I will swim across Lake Michigan and slap them both. Green Bay has spent 7,456,298,447 draft picks on defense, spent huge money on multiple defenders this off season, gotten rid of Clay Matthews bloated corpse and Nick Perry’s broken hand (how can you break your hand every single fucking year??), and somehow they will still regularly give up first downs on 3rd and 15+. Jesus Fucking Christ.


Nicholas:


Mike:

All you need to do is browse r/GreenBayPackers for 5 minutes to discover toxicity, ignorance and Boston-levels of inferiority complexes. I’ve never seen such a whiny, entitled bunch of fans in my life. They are seriously giving the Patriots a run for their money. People on the Packers subreddit are literally threatening physical violence against Greg Jennings and Jermichael Finley for their opinions. I fucking guarantee you if that piece of shit John Kuhn had said anything negative, fans would have believed every word of it. Look, I love Aaron Rodgers, but some of these “fans” worship him to levels that would have made Jim Jones blush. In their minds, Rodgers is god, and anything less than a Super Bowl is a wasted season. What kind of existence is that? Packers fans are fat, lazy, entitled pieces of shit that think they deserve dynasty after dynasty. Just look what happens to them after two losing seasons! What the fuck do you think will happen when the Packers inevitably fade into irrelevance? These fuckers will be the first ones to the exit signs, on their way to go burn their Super Bowl sweatshirts in front of their mobile homes.


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