Same article:

The internal reluctance to hire Ball was rooted in the idea that he would be a continuation of the Ted Thompson way, i.e., largely ignoring free agency and relying heavily on the draft. In fact, Ball has had a large role in the Packers’ roster-building efforts the past two seasons as Thompson, 64, aged and cut back his schedule. It's believed that Ball actually made the call on whether to re-sign free agents Julius Peppers and Micah Hyde last offseason.
The most Ted thing to do is to sign your own (that would have included Hyde and maybe Peppers) and ignore free agents.

So they did not sign their own and singed free agents.

But some boneheads in the org see Russ Ball's hands on the two least popular decisions last offseason and Demovsky doesn't mention 3 FA signings that happened while Ball supposedly had this larger role. But the fear of FA still makes it into the piece despite the logical inconsistency.

Does anyone else sense a concerted effort to undermine Ball here?

There has been a lot of public jockeying for this job going back a couple of years. We have had a few Eliot Wolf write ups and one about Gutekunst over a year ago. Ball got a profile at the beginning of this year and it contained no comments from the Packers or the Saints. Has all the media about this event been arranged by their agents?

It might have been that Ted's greatest achievement was to get them all to shut up and concentrate on football for 12/13 years. Favre's exit was the exception.