Training Camp Will Feature More Joint Practices

INDIANAPOLIS – The Green Bay Packers will hold joint practices again during the team’s 2020 training camp.

“We have a team but I don’t know if I can tell you yet,” coach Matt LaFleur said on Tuesday at the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis.

The practices will be held in Green Bay, just like they were last year, when the Packers hosted the Houston Texans for two days of practices and a preseason game.

CHECK OUT OUR MASSIVE SCOUTING COMBINE PREVIEW

“It’s good to change the scenery a little bit and go against a different scheme,” LaFleur said. “You try not to scheme up your own team on a daily basis. It’s more or less about trying to build on your foundation and get good at the core concepts you’re going to run throughout the season, really in all three phases. It gives you somebody else to go against and test those concepts against somebody else.”

Last year’s joint practices were the team’s first since 2005.

“I wouldn’t mind if they didn’t do it for another 14 years,” quarterback Aaron Rodgers said last year. No fan of preseason games, Rodgers disliked the joint practices for a similar reason. While the practices provided physical competition for the linemen and perimeter players, much of a quarterback’s game is played between his ears. Just like the exhibition games, when teams hide their latest and greatest plays and stick to vanilla schemes, both teams did the same in advance of their preseason game.

Joint practices might become a regular way of doing business if a proposed new collective bargaining agreement is approved, which would transform the traditional schedule of 16 regular-season games and four preseason games to 17 and three. That would mean one fewer exhibition to evaluate players, and presumably one less week of training camp.

“I think those were really helpful,” general manager Brian Gutekunst said. “It was a way for our guys who are established to get the reps that they needed against a quality opponent, taking some risk factors away, and allowing our younger guys to have more time in the actual game under the lights, which I think is important.”