It finally happened on Monday: the Jaire Alexander era ended. For a few days there, it looked like the two sides would reach some sort of new agreement on a contract – Alexander was even rumored to be heading to Green Bay to take part in team offseason activities, which is usually not what you do when you're trying to force your way somewhere else.
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But, ultimately, the move that everyone thought would happen did, in fact, happen. Now Alexander can go find test the market (kinda) and the Packers can re-prioritize a bunch of cap space. It's a win-win for everyone involved, and no one else. And because we're all just little gossips who love messy breakup details, Albert Breer's reporting on how the whole situation unfolded is The Good Stuff.
Albert Breer lays out the timeline of Packers' decision to cut Jaire Alexander
"The Packers’ divorce from Jaire Alexander was months in the making, and shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Alexander was never making the $17.5 million in nonguaranteed money he had on his contract for 2025, and that’s not a reflection of his play—last year, first-year DC Jeff Hafley called games differently with Alexander in there, a reflection of the impact he’s still capable of making. The issue, of course, is he wasn’t in there nearly enough ... Green Bay shopped him in March, trying to find a suitor that’d be willing to take on the money. No one was, and Alexander’s stance had been that he’d rather be cut, and get to pick his next home, than agree to a reworked deal to facilitate a trade. The Packers tried again over the weekend of the draft, but to no avail. They did try to keep him, too. Alexander’s contract locked him in with Green Bay through 2026, and the Packers offered to lop off the last year of the contract and allow him to become a free agent next March if he accepted a reduced, incentive-laden deal. Alexander didn’t like the structure of Green Bay’s proposal, which led to this situation dragging into June."
Ultimately, it sounds like things didn't actually change all that much? At the end of the day, the Packers couldn't find a trade partner and Alexander wasn't down to play ball with Green Bay's front office, which is ... exactly where both sides where immediately after the season ended.
So that's that. Now Alexander will go to, like, the Bills or something and the Packers can give a full team effort into pretending that Keisean Nixon was always the replacement plan.