Today was that one monumental day of the year that Ted Thompson delivers his pre-draft press conference… and says pretty much nothing about anything.
Ted spent much of the time talking about his big Julius Peppers acquisition, which he’s pretty happy about. However, the most interesting nugget came when he was asked about free agency.
Like, hey Ted, why you guys no participate in free agency? Seriously, I think that’s exactly how the question was uttered.
Well, Ted fired back with a rousing “do too!”
You know, it just doesn’t ever net any results.
“People who say we don’t use free agency are wrong,” Thompson said. “We’ve always dabbled in free agency. Sometimes you can spend a lot of time and effort recruiting a guy, which we’ve done in the past, and nothing comes of it, and nothing comes out publicly and people assume we didn’t try to do something. We almost always, almost every offseason, try to do something in free agency, certainly with our own guys but also with guys around the league.”
So yeah. Take that, naysayers!
Of course, a sane person might think maybe you should change your approach if you’re constantly trying to lure guys via free agency and never getting any. Because we can all see the end result.
Whether it’s true or not, there’s a perception that the Packers like to nickel and dime guys. And that’s swell if you’re a big fan of salary cap space, but most of us are fans of players and teams.
As far as all of that goes, we’ll just say Ron Wolf did it right, Mike Sherman did it wrong and Ted Thompson does it very uninterestingly.