Green Bay Packers: How Ted Thompson’s selections in 2016 stack up against league
By Ryan Schlipp
Typically you want to give a general manager three years before you critique his draft picks. Still, with the 2017 draft approaching, I found myself wondering just how about the capabilities of Green Bay Packers GM Ted Thompson.
We all hear Ted is a draft guru. But is he really?
After a few days of research I was able to pull together a cheat sheet of the 2016 draft. The first and most important aspect that needs to be established is, obviously, who’s the best. I’m sure there are a lot of ways this can be done but for my money I want to know who is going to do the best with what they have to work with.
In order to accomplish that I simply looked at the value of the players drafted and compared it against the value of the picks the team had available to them. As far as determining how well a player performed I relied on Pro Football Focus. How I used the data is highly confidential information.
The grades are somewhat arbitrary but I wanted you to be able to see the magnitude of a given GM’s success compared to the others. If you couldn’t tell, I set the top GM to 10 and compared the others against him.
| Team | GM | Grade |
| Patriots | Bill Belichick | 10.00 |
| Chiefs | John Dorsey | 9.46 |
| Cardinals | Steve Keim | 6.99 |
| Packers | Ted Thompson | 6.71 |
| Vikings | Rick Spielman | 6.48 |
| Broncos | John Elway | 6.16 |
| Seahawks | John Schneider | 6.07 |
| Steelers | Kevin Colbert | 5.73 |
| Browns | Sashi Brown | 5.64 |
| Bears | Ryan Price | 5.64 |
| Lions | Bob Quinn | 5.23 |
| Colts | Ryan Grigson | 4.97 |
| Panthers | David Gettleman | 4.72 |
| Jets | Mike Maccagnan | 4.45 |
| Texans | Rick Smith | 4.19 |
| Raiders | Reggie McKenzie | 4.19 |
| Titans | Jon Robinson | 4.12 |
| Bengals | Mike Brown | 3.95 |
| Falcons | Thomas Dimitroff | 3.89 |
| Dolphins | Chris Grier | 3.73 |
| Giants | Jerry Reese | 3.72 |
| Redskins | Scot McCloughan | 3.62 |
| Ravens | Ozzie Newsome | 3.47 |
| Saints | Mickey Loomis | 3.34 |
| Bills | Doug Whaley | 3.28 |
| Cowboys | Jerry Jones | 2.60 |
| 49ers | Trent Baalke | 2.54 |
| Chargers | Tom Telesco | 2.45 |
| Eagles | Howie Roseman | 2.21 |
| Jaguars | David Caldwell | 2.13 |
| Rams | Les Snead | 2.00 |
| Bucs | Jason Licht | 1.63 |
As you can see, Ted held up pretty well in year 1. Despite having the eighth worst set of picks available to him, Thompson pulled off the fifth best draft in terms of the value he was able to uncover.
The above is probably the most important as well as the most comforting but I found a few other tidbits.
Read on about contributions …
Contributions
The Packers are one of only six teams to have all their draft picks contribute in year 1. To make that a little more impressive, 13 teams actually cut at least one of their draft picks.
In total, the Packers class of 2016 amassed 1,672 snaps at an average of 239 snaps per draft pick, which is ranked 22nd. Not overly impressive but considering Blake Martinez was really the only starter and none of the positions are high snap positions like offensive line or safety, I would say it’s a good number.
Below are the snap counts for each player.
| Kenny Clark | 410 |
| Jason Spriggs | 276 |
| Kyler Fackrell | 171 |
| Blake Martinez | 480 |
| Dean Lowry | 210 |
| Trevor Davis | 117 |
| Kyle Murphy | 8 |
Let’s grade …