For a guy who’s no longer with the Packers, we’ve heard a lot over the past week or so both about and from De’Vondre Campbell. That, of course, is understandable. When a player leaves a team (or, in this case, has the team leave him), there are bound to be some complicated emotions on both sides. But what stands out about Campbell’s comments online is how specific he gets. He makes it clear he has no problem with the Packers as an organization overall (even if he would have preferred his release be handled differently), but he specifically criticizes how he was used by former Packers defensiv ..read more

Even though Xavier McKinney is the more expensive, important, and perhaps impactful signing, I can’t help but be fascinated by the Packers’ move to acquire Josh Jacobs, recently of the Las Vegas Vikings. Jacobs, who briefly made up the league’s most dynamic running back duo with Aaron Jones, comes to the Packers under unique circumstances. While McKinney enters a safety room that was essentially empty, Jacobs will be a virtual one-to-one replacement for both the now-departed Jones and AJ Dillon. And with the Packers’ long-running investment in Jones via his contract extension and subsequent r ..read more

I can’t watch a Packers game without a pen and notebook with me. I started taking notes during games when The Power Sweep launched in 2016, and I’ve kept the habit since then to the point that I can no longer imagine sitting down to watch a game without it. My note-taking practice is not one of beauty, though. It gets down all the information I need, but as you can see in this post, it’s…not pretty to look at. I’ve never been one for good handwriting, and even though I’ve worked to improve over the years (honestly, I have!) it’s still not great. No one will ever confuse my notes for a work of ..read more

Two years into his NFL career, most of what was true about Quay Walker as a prospect seems to still be true today. He’s still an elite athlete. The Packers have not seen the like of him at linebacker this side of Y2K. His size, speed, and movement skills are incomparable in Green Bay and rare throughout the league. He’s still a little bit on the raw side, as he was coming out of Georgia. He wasn’t a full-time starter there until late in his career and is still feeling his way through the position at times. He still has unique versatility. Even if he has yet to fully live up to his potential ..read more

There are significant “what” and “how” components to everything a player does on a football field. What a guy does on a particular play, over the course of a game, or even in an entire season can be neatly, if incompletely, encapsulated by traditional stats. Even if they don’t tell the whole story, a “bigger numbers = good” understanding of the game will help you in a lot of circumstances. But if you’re looking for the whole story, examining how a player gets his stats is crucial. Film analysis helps with that a lot, and so do advanced stats. Along those lines, understanding how a player does ..read more

Certain people bend the world around them, and the people in their orbit have to order themselves accordingly. That seems to be the case with Vince Lombardi, a singular figure in sports, the world, and in the lives of just about everyone he encountered. His death left a gaping hole, and the people who had to carry on without him never seemed to find a way to fill the gap he’d left.  Marie Lombardi, as you’d expect, suffered the most, making for a sad ending to a difficult life story. For so long it seemed like she was a prisoner to her husband’s ambitions, but the last few chapters of th ..read more

Working through our annual position-by-position recap, I thought of something I really haven’t considered before: we don’t really do grades for players. Sure, I make a ruling on whether or not a player has “met expectations” or not in a given year, but we really don’t go deeper than that. It’s always struck me as the intuitive way to do things, but I’ve never really tried to articulate why that is. Why do things that way instead of assigning one player a B+ and another player a C- or what have you? For starters, I think if you try to come up with an established grading system, you’re going to ..read more

A biography will almost always end in death. That’s kind of how the genre works, especially when your subject is, you know, dead. That’s basically where it comes to an end for most of us. So on the one hand, of course When Pride Still Mattered was going to end there. A story about Lombardi’s life would end with his death. No duh. But I hope you’ll take my meaning when I say that Lombardi’s death was how it had to be for him. The way he died was how he had to die: stubbornly and relatively young and in the middle of building something new. First, stubbornly. While it’s true that colon cancer i ..read more

In the slightly paraphrased words of Kevin Green, it is time…to bring back my Ask Me Anything column. I got way off track with our quarterly entries in this category late in 2023, but I want to get back to it. So here is a collection of your questions about anything and everything that’s on your mind. Besides Lambeau Field, what's your favorite stadium? This is a tough one for a few reasons. First, I have not had the good fortune to watch an NFL game in any NFL stadium that exists today other than Lambeau Field. I say “that exists today” because my lone NFL road game experience came in the Mi ..read more

When I think about Vince Lombardi’s tenure in Washington, two questions come to mind. First, if he’d had time to really implement his vision, would it have ended up looking any different from his time in Green Bay? Lombardi always wanted to run the ball. He wanted to run the ball with the Packers. He wanted to run the ball with the Giants. He wanted to run the ball at Army and at St. Cecelia’s. But is that because he believed that was the best thing to do or because he never had anybody worth throwing the ball with? Bart Starr was certainly not a bad passer, but even a generous assessor would ..read more