Green Bay Packers coaching staff met with the media yesterday gearing up for the start of the NFL new year. The NFL Scouting Combine will be next week, and the NFL new year will kick off 10 days later on March 13th. Matt LaFleur and his coaching staff met with the media on late Monday morning. From what you could gather from a press conference from LaFleur, Nathaniel Hackett, Mike Pettine and others was a true excitement to get going and really make Green Bay a great team again in the coming months. These guys all brought a great deal of energy to the table which was something LaFleur sought out in his interview process. Some have pointed out the experience of the Packers coaching staff should be concerning to fans yet that is a very hard thing to quantify.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had a column expressing the concern of the Packers coaching staff especially on the offensive side of the ball. Tom Silverstein points out that the last two Packers coaches did it a bit differently with their staffs. It is an interesting piece of compare and contrast what happened in years past, yet, football changed so much in the last few decades. The comparison is much harder than it would be if Green Bay cycled through coaches like they were a team like Cleveland.

It is fair to challenge why LaFleur decided to go with a brand new staff who was younger than what we are accustomed to in Green Bay, but I believe we need to dig a little deeper than just at the age of each coach. Remember Packers President Mark Murphy met with a veteran group of players including Aaron Rodgers to get feedback on the last coaching staff. Many players talked about the lack of ‘passion’ and other issues that plagued the team throughout the final years of Mike McCarthy. Part of me believes that is why LaFleur chose to get a new, younger staff was due to the feedback from players about what was missing from this team.

This will be a point of contention all year especially early on if Green Bay were to struggle out the gate, but it’s important to recognize as well that this might be part of the process of launching the Packers into today’s NFL.

Charlie.