Going into a position group with no experience is fine if you are in full rebuild. Our receiver group was so green last year. It took most of the season for them to develop. But LB does not live by the QB. Offenses will play into our inexperience.
One other thing that relates to this conversation - it's coming out that Green Bay did not have any real interest in free agent RBs until the weekend, when it became apparent that Jones was not going to give in. Jones was their Plan A for RB until late Friday/sometime Saturday.
Prior to that, we know that they had a list which likely had McKinney at the top - call McKinney "1" on their list.
We can also presume that the Jones development immediately elevated running back to "1B", ahead of whatever other targets Gutekunst had on the list... with McKinney probably still 1A.
Whatever was #2 on the list had to get shoved aside, and with what we know of the team's needs, it seems like a good bet that linebacker was #2.
So it seems highly likely that until last weekend, Gute had a good plan in place for solving linebacker. One that probably would have worked. We can be sure that he had players in mind, and a budget he was confident would pay the tab.
Considering how long he'd had to work things out, I'm reasoanblly sure the linebacker plan would have had a high likelihod of success, and right now we'd probably be looking at a 2024 with Aaron Jones at RB (along with a Day Two draft pick to develop under him), Xavier McKinney at safety, and maybe Frankie Luvu at linebacker. Or Patrick Queen. Or cheaper but still substantial additions like Jordyn Brooks or Azeez Al-Shaair. Maybe Jeremy Chinn as a hybrid strong safety/LB (who I still think was a lost opportunity. He's gonna rock Washington's world.; I'm expecting a big year from him with the Commanders), but quite possibly some other second safety to bolster that position while we draft a couple to develop.
But whatever might have been in an alternate universe, the thing that's certain is that the Jones development changed Green Bay's entire offseason reload plan. Gute had to redesign his free agency strategy to fix running back, and whatever his plan was for other positiions (linebacker, probably safey #2 as well) had to wait.
I'm sure he had a terrific Plan B, but there's no way to know how much that Plan B was impacted by the Jones development. But I think it's safe to see the impact was probably substantial, because it suddenly rearranged a hell of a lot of arithmetic that had been carefully worked out for many weeks. What he does next as Plan C is still a mystery, but one thing that seems likely is that we're going into the draft a lot weaker at linebacker than he had hoped.
The one thing that makes me scratch my head is that if I'm right about this, a couple million per year to keep Jones seems trivial. Seems all this disruption is a huge price to pay for all the chaos and instabillity I'm describing, and would Gute really have thought it was worth all that? So it's quite possible I'm completely missing something, and maybe a million miles away from being close to nailing it. I know I have some of it right, and certainly some of it wrong, but how much of each I cant know. Just sonethig to kick around, i guess.
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