Paul Bretl | 4/21/2025
GREEN BAY, Wis. — As Packers GM Brian Gutekunst said during his end-of-season press conference, it’s time that this team starts competing for championships. He also stressed the importance of urgency.
So, given where this Packers team is currently at and the goals they have, is it mandatory that their first-round pick in the 2025 NFL draft come in and make an immediate impact? Well, maybe not.
“No, I think you’d love to,” said Gutekunst when meeting with reporters on Monday. “It’s great when they do, but that’s not always the case. And this is, the transition to the National Football League is tough. It’s not always easy. A lot of times it’s really determined by opportunity. If you take a guy in a particular area that he’s just going to have a lot more opportunity than somebody else, and we try to stay away from that, that drafting for need, and we try to just take the best player available, if that’s possible. But most of the time, a guy’s impact in his rookie year comes down to the opportunities that he had, more than anything.”
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One of the first questions that Gutekunst and his scouting department ask themselves when evaluating a prospect is, what is that player going to do in the NFL? Who are they going to be?
That’s the educated prediction that the Packers are attempting to make as they build out their big board ahead of the draft, and it’s those answers that will be essential in determining who they end up selecting.
To get to those answers, there are obviously numerous factors and variables in play, including one of the age-old NFL draft questions of production or potential. Selecting the player who could perhaps help more so right away or the prospect loaded with upside?
To find that answer, it’s about figuring out the why. If the traits appear to be there, then why wasn’t the production? Or if there was a ton of production, can how the prospect accumulated those numbers translate to the NFL level, and then be sustained and improved upon?
“What you’re trying to predict is what they’re going to do in the National Football League,” said Gutekunst. “That’s first and foremost, so, if a player didn’t have the kind of production that you think he should at the college level and just, there’s a lot of discussion about why, why that was and if you think that’s something that as he moves forward and he progresses as a football player, if that’s going to change or not.”
Through that process, it’s about establishing where a player is currently positioned on their learning trajectory, and identifying how much more growth is out there for them if in the right environment at the NFL level.
An important part of that equation is that teams will utilize a player’s measurements and athletic testing figures as a barometer for how high that prospect’s ceiling can be. And in today’s NFL, there is no shortage of information that is out there when it comes to these metrics. As Gutekunst described, even when players opt out of certain drills, while there is more work involved on the team’s part, using GPS tracking data, which most Power 5 schools have, the Packers are able to get the data they need.
“I come from the Ron Wolf, Ted Thompson,” Gutekunst said, “so traits are very very important to us. Testing numbers are important, and that’s part of the changing world in scouting right now. These guys are really picking and choosing what they do. We don’t have universal numbers across the board like we used to, which makes it tough, but there are some new technologies coming into play with GPS data and things like that, that you kind of have to try to make up for it. So the traits are really important to us.”
Even from the outside looking in, there are certain athletic testing metrics and thresholds that have seemingly been established for the Packers at specific position groups. All of that is quantifiable, and the team can determine whether or not the data that they have lines up with what they are seeing on film.
But one of the more difficult aspects of this evaluation process is when the team is attempting to measure those unquantifiable, but important, elements that go into playing the game of football. One example of this is a player’s competitiveness. How much do they love the game of football?
“I think the motivation of why guys play is something we spend a lot of time (on), trying to find out their ‘whys.’ I do think it’s important. This league’s hard. There’s a lot of adversity—for even the best players. And to go out there and compete each and every day to get better takes a lot. There’s a lot of competition in these rooms. So, the motivation for these guys to go to do that better be strong. If it’s not, it’s probably easy to find a way out.”
Another one of those unquantifiable metrics is instincts, which can put a player in the right position over and over again to make plays. You can’t put instincts on a spread sheet and then attempting to identify how one prospect’s instincts compare to another prospect’s high-end athletic traits is a whole new challenge.
“That’s one of the harder things,” said Gutekunst on evaluating instincts. “I think also one of the harder things is where he is in his development with that, because instincts aren’t something you either have or don’t have. I think it’s something that is over time you either gain or don’t, but every player’s at a little bit different part of their process. A lot of that depends on how much playing time they got in college and maybe where they came from in high school.”
When it comes to gathering all of this information and data, the Packers have their own processes for going about doing so and the metrics for evaluating it all. But by Gutekunst’s own admission, with the current state of the college football landscape and many players playing for multiple schools during their college careers, the frequent movement at the college football level has made it difficult at times to evaluate these metrics as the team wants. There’s additional legwork that is now very much a part of the equation to make sure that all the correct information is available to the Packers.
At this stage of the pre-draft process for the Packers, the work is done. Now it’s about trusting all that time that’s been put in and letting the board ultimately do the dictating for the Packers and allowing that to make their decisions.
However, when it comes to those decisions, while immediate help will always be welcomed, as the Packers go through their draft evaluation process, it’s ultimately about determining where a player is in his development and how high his ceiling is if brought into the Packers organization.
The hope, of course, is that the Packers find instant help and long-term growth potential. That’s the goal. But not to be forgotten in all this is that the draft is about projecting who a player will become down the road, and it’s less about who they are on draft night.
“The unpredictability is real,” said Gutekunst of the draft, “but I think for us, it’s just a matter of, we take a lot of pride in the people that we bring into this locker room. We’re obviously chasing things that are really big around here and we’ve got a very good football team with some really good guys in that locker room, and the guys we bring into this locker room, to me, need to be the kind of guys that are going to fit into that culture and add to it.
“And so every year, this is an opportunity to do that. The culture of your football team comes from your players, and so that’s a big part of what we’re doing.”