Quote Originally Posted by 3irty1 View Post
There is no such thing as an alternative to draft and develop. When you have to follow a salary cap like everyone else, the path to a better team than everyone else is to hit your draft picks. Get great players on ridiculously underpriced rookie contracts. Every good team has this working for them.

Furthermore the free agency of Ron Wolf's day is very different from early Ted's day and starting to change again right now. Players like Reggie White will only hit free agency again in the rarest of circumstances. That was a different world. By Ted's day FA was something that bad teams did to get to the salary cap and good teams to put fingers in the dike. In this time period one of the best signings ever was Woodson and he was considered a major risk. Today FA is still retreads and risks but what's changing is the salary cap is exploding faster than contracts can keep up. Teams have money so might as well get some mercenaries to sure up the ranks.
I guess you're too young to remember back in the day George Allen and the Redskins trading away virtually their entire draft almost every year. They were pretty successful at that alternative method of team building. I don't necessarily advocate that or even a modern version of it, but just saying ......

I would argue that the steadily increasing - you say exploding - salary cap makes quality free agent signing more feasible, not less than in Ron Wolf's day. Wolf of course, was way more draft and develop than most GMs - just not nearly to the extent that Ted Thompson was.

The current plight of the Packers is a direct result of Ron AND Ted's flawed way of doing things. It was masked for over two decades by the greatness of Aaron Rodgers and Favre before him, but it caught up with us last season.

What's this stuff doing in a Pettine thread instead of a Gutekunst thread?