Judging by the comments by both Packers’ general manager Ted Thompson and head coach Mike McCarthy, the Green Bay Packers may be a landing spot for the biggest enigma in this year’s NFL Draft. Thompson and McCarthy had nothing but good things to say about Tim Tebow in surprisingly candid reviews of the Florida phenom. McCarthy even saying he “would love to work with him.”
Tebow is generally regarded as a second or third-round pick and if he does slip to the third round I could see the Packers taking him. I know the Packers don’t need a starting quarterback but they could certainly use a solid backup. The Packers could develop Tebow over the next few years and maybe toss in a few Michael Vick-type plays like the Eagles did last year with Vick playing behind Donovan McNabb.
True, the Packers have more pressing needs but the Packers are also pressing their luck with quarterback health (knock on wood hard after reading the next sentence). The last time a quarterback for the Green Bay Packers was injured in a game so bad he couldn’t start the next week was 1992 – 18 seasons! That is ridiculous. We all thought Aaron Rodgers was injury prone but if he didn’t get hurt in the beating he took last year he may well be on to an iron man streak of his own. Still, 18 years is a long time not to have a QB go down, the Packers would be wise to be well stocked at that position.
Drafting QBs worked well in the 90’s under Ron Wolf. Guys like Matt Hasselbeck, Aaron Brooks, Ty Detmer come immediately to mind. None were world-beaters but Hasselbeck went to a Super Bowl in Seattle and Brooks and Detmer started in the league after leaving Green Bay. Guys like that could at least get you through the year, granted any championship hopes would have been gone had Favre gone down back then and that certainly is the same case now under Rodgers.
The Packers right now are as thin at QB as at any time in recent memory. Matt Flynn is not NFL caliber material, if Rodgers goes down the Packers become the St. Louis Rams. If you can get one year of development out of Tebow I think he can become an NFL quarterback. The man is a winner and a hard worker and has succeeded at every level. And Mike McCarthy already has changed the throwing motion of Rodgers after Rodgers came into the NFL from the Jeff Tedford school of quarterbacking which had’t had much success in the NFL until A-Rodge.
Tedford’s QBs do include Super Bowl winner Trent Dilfer, but you or I could have quarterbacked his Baltimore Raven team that year. Guys like David Carr, Joey Harrington, Kyle Bollar and the all-time colossal failure Akili Smith are his other graduates. McCarthy himself didn’t want anything do to with Rodgers when McCarthy was offensive coordinator in San Francisco when the 49ers drafted Alex Smith instead of Rodgers with the first pick in the draft in 2005. What McCarthy has done with Rodgers since then is nothing short of remarkable.
If not Tebow, the quarterback position is one area that has flew under the radar this off-season and the Packers do need help there. Is it a priority, I don’t know, but QB isn’t like any other position, you can’t game-plan around a QB who can’t play, not unless you have the best defense and the best running game in the league. The Packers will need to upgrade here at some point and a third-round pick on Tebow that could turn into a second down the road would not be a bad investment.