After big night, ‘perfectionist’ Ty Summers laments the ones that got away

The seventh-round pick is in the middle of a big roster battle at inside linebacker.

Ty Summers grew up about 250 miles from Houston. He spent the first half of Thursday’s preseason game in the vicinity of the Houston Texans’ backfield.

Summers, a rookie linebacker for the Green Bay Packers, recorded nine of his 10 tackles during the first half of the Packers’ 28-26 victory. With Summers replacing veteran starter Blake Martinez in the lineup and the other starter, Oren Burks, dropping out on the opening series with a shoulder injury, Summers played 66 of 80 snaps on defense and another 13 on special teams.

“They told me, ‘Hey, be ready to be gassed after this one,’” Summers said after the game. “So I was like, ‘All right.’ I said, ‘Hey, man, I need all the reps I can get.’ If I’m gassed at the end, I’m working on my cardio. I loved it. Sore. That’s all part of it when you’re on special teams and defense, but I appreciate their willingness to keep me in.”

On the bright side, Summers made a bunch of impact tackles. Seven of his 10 tackles came on runs by the running back; six of those seven plays gained a combined 11 yards. On the other hand, Summers missed four tackles by our unofficial count; Pro Football Focus marked him down for two.

Summers said he should have had four more tackles.

“Probably about five” tackles, inside linebackers coach Kirk Olivadotti said on Friday. “There were some opportunities for him to make a couple more plays, and that’s what growing and learning in the process is for – this whole training camp thing, the whole process of the offseason going into training camp and then going into your first game. There’s stages of everything.”

A seventh-round pick who was part linebacker, part pass rusher at TCU after playing quarterback in high school, Summers is in the middle of a heated battle for a roster spot. While he got the start on Thursday, he’s been stuck taking third-team reps through most of training camp behind undrafted rookie Curtis Bolton on the depth chart. A 10-tackle game certainly won’t hurt his chances, but Summers wanted more. A self-proclaimed “perfectionist,” it’s no surprise that it’s the plays that got away, not the plays he made, that were stuck in his head in the immediate aftermath.

“More disappointed with the ones that got away from me,” Summers said. “That’s kind of a bad habit of mine. It’s good because then I’m going out there and I want to hone on the little details. I want to be perfect but, at the end of the day, I can’t let my last play, last mistake affect my future play. That’s something I’m going to continue to grow on. You can’t let one missed tackle become two. So, yeah, I’ll look back at it and be like, ‘Hey, there’s things I need to fix.’ I’m going to work through those in my mind and figure out ways I could’ve done better. At the end of the day, it’s over now. I’m looking forward to next week.”