Gutekunst Geared Up for Work-From-Home Draft

Green Bay Packers GM Brian Gutekunst turned part of the family home into his own personal draft room.

GREEN BAY, Wis. – Assuming the Green Bay Packers’ 2020 NFL Draft goes off without a hitch, the unsung hero will be Mike Halbach.

Halbach is entering his sixth season as the team’s director of football technology. With the NFL conducting an unprecedented virtual draft amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been Halbach’s mission to get general manager Brian Gutekunst up and running at his home. 

“It’s better than I could have expected,” Gutekunst said in a conference call late Monday afternoon. “Back in 2012 when I moved up here, we kind of went from binders, which is what we really had done before Ted (Thompson), and then really started to do everything digitally. So, I think we were pretty well-prepared for something like this. It’s just been a lot of trial and error over the last couple of weeks to make sure you get it right.”

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Gutekunst talked for about 40 minutes on Monday. At about 9 minutes and in the middle of an answer about how he'll communicate with his staff, the line went dead. Gutekunst had been dropped from the call. 

"Hopefully that doesn’t happen on Thursday," he said when he returned a minute later.

It was impossible to ignore the irony, though important to note the call was being conducted through a national conference-call service and probably had nothing to do with the network the league has assembled.

Gutekunst turned part of the family home into his own personal draft room. That’s where he was earlier in the day, when the NFL conducted a league-wide test of the online infrastructure that will be used to make 255 selections over Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

“A lot of it was getting comfortable with how I was going to communicate with not only the league and other teams, but also with the guys,” Gutekunst said. “Like, if I wanted to talk to multiple people at one time or guys individually, we went through that. We got a lot of answers. That was the big thing, was getting through this and finding out the answers how we really want to do this.”

The next couple days will be spent fine-tuning the process between Gutekunst – the team’s third-year general manager – and his veteran staff. By the time the first round begins on Thursday night, Gutekunst said he’ll be “overcoached” but comfortable with how to conduct a draft unlike any in the history of professional sports.

After the draft ends on Saturday afternoon, Gutekunst said he’s going to unleash his staff to conduct undrafted free agency – a free-for-all under the best of circumstances but even more hectic this year.

Beyond that, this year’s draft will provide a glimpse into Gutekunst’s job for his wife and four children. With the success of the draft almost wholly dependent on functioning Internet, this might not be the best weekend for them to binge-watch a bunch of movies on Netflix.

“We’ve had some loose conversations,” Gutekunst said. “My kids are pretty good about those kind of things, so I’m not super-worried about it. I think my son Michael and maybe a couple of my daughters may come in and tell me who I should pick. I’m not really concerned. It will be neat, I think, for my family to be basically in the draft room and be able to hear me, having never really seen that or been part of that. I’m excited for them to see what dad does – part of what he does, anyway. That’ll be a positive that comes out of this, I think.”