Packer Central

With Packers Hosting Draft, Can They Trade First-Round Pick?

Green Bay Packers GM Brian Gutekunst will face no restrictions with his first-round pick.
Bill Huber|
Packers GM Brian Gutekunst at the Scouting Combine
Packers GM Brian Gutekunst at the Scouting Combine | Bill Huber/Packers On SI

INDIANAPOLIS – In the first round of the 2008 NFL Draft, then-Green Bay Packers general manager Ted Thompson traded out of the first round and selected Jordy Nelson early in the second.

Back in the day, the general manager made an appearance at the Packers’ draft party at Lambeau Field. Thompson was booed.

Imagine if Thompson’s successor, Brian Gutekunst, traded out of the first round at the Green Bay-hosted draft and the legion of Packers fans – having braved hours of whatever weather Mother Nature throws at Green Bay on the night of April 24 – went home without a pick being made.

“I won’t be on that stage,” Gutekunst, with a smile, told a group of local reporters in a conference room at the Westin Hotel on Tuesday morning.

The Packers are scheduled to pick 23rd in this year’s draft, which will be located outside Lambeau Field on the corner of Oneida Street and Lombardi Avenue.

Would it make for great TV for the Packers to trade out of the first round? Or if they trade it for a veteran player?

Of course not. But Gutekunst will have no restrictions on what to do in the first round of the draft brought to Green Bay under the leadership of outgoing team President Mark Murphy.

“Mark actually made a joke the other day,” Gutekunst said. “He was just like, ‘I want to make sure you know you can trade.’

“But I am super-excited about the draft being in Green Bay, which I didn’t think I’d say because it’s going to be a little bit of some tough days for us trying to get in and out. But I think it’s going to be such a cool thing for the community, our organization. It’s going to be neat it will have no effect on what we do with that pick.”

This will be Gutekunst’s eighth draft. He’s never not had a first-round pick. In fact, he had two in 2019, when Gutekunst’s maneuverings netted Rashan Gary and Darnell Savage, and two in 2022, thanks to the trade of Davante Adams.

The last time the Packers didn’t have a first-round pick was 2017 – the infamous draft in which Thompson could have picked T.J. Watt at No. 29 but wound up with Kevin King at No. 33.

The draft is a big deal for the Green Bay community but will create some logistical hurdles for Gutekunst and the rest of the front-office personnel, who have to get to Lambeau Field. Gutekunst said he told his scouts “absolutely not” when it was mentioned they could sleep in their office.

“To me, those four days, I’ll look out the window every now and again and say, ‘That’s really neat,’ and then go back in the draft room, where I can’t hear a thing and we’ll go about our business,” Gutekunst said. “I have a lot of confidence in our organization that they’ll pull this off in a grand fashion and, really, neat to see.”

More Green Bay Packers News

Published
Bill Huber
BILL HUBER

Bill Huber, who has covered the Green Bay Packers since 2008, is the publisher of Packers On SI, a Sports Illustrated channel. E-mail: packwriter2002@yahoo.com History: Huber took over Packer Central in August 2019. Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillHuberNFL Background: Huber graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he played on the football team, in 1995. He worked in newspapers in Reedsburg, Wisconsin Dells and Shawano before working at The Green Bay News-Chronicle and Green Bay Press-Gazette from 1998 through 2008. With The News-Chronicle, he won several awards for his commentaries and page design. In 2008, he took over as editor of Packer Report Magazine, which was founded by Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke, and PackerReport.com. In 2019, he took over the new Sports Illustrated site Packer Central, which he has grown into one of the largest sites in the Sports Illustrated Media Group.