Opinion: Packers must make an all-out run at the best special teams coordinator on the market
GREEN BAY - As much as Green Bay Packers fans want to celebrate coach Matt LaFleur’s decision to remove Maurice Drayton as his special teams coordinator, they should know that the organization’s special teams failures don’t weigh completely on Drayton’s shoulders.
It was next to impossible for LaFleur to bring Drayton back after the special teams debacle that was the divisional playoff loss to the San Francisco 49ers. It would have been an untenable strain on Drayton to have fans and media second-guessing every decision from the beginning of the preseason on.
It isn’t fair to slap an incompetent label on a guy after he had one season as a coordinator and who people in the organization still believe is a good coach. It may be that he isn’t coordinator material, but it’s hard to make that judgment given the circumstances.
We’ll never know how things might have been different if Drayton had a reliable punt returner, a capable long snapper and a kicker who could regularly boom kickoffs out of the end zone.
Take a look at some of the special teams turnarounds in the NFL. All it took was returner Braxton Berrios to vault the New York Jets from 26th in 2020 to ‘13th in ’21 in Rick Gosselin’s special teams rankings. Or Matt Gay hitting 32 of 34 field goals and Brandon Powell’s late-season boost on punt and kickoff returns to lift the Los Angeles Rams from 30th to 16th.
The Packers, on the other hand, have failed their special teams units.
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They haven’t had a dedicated returner – someone who wasn’t drafted or signed for another position – who lasted more than a year or two since Antonio Chatman (2003-05). They have gotten solid but not sustained return years from Charles Woodson, Micah Hyde, Tramon Williams, Randall Cobb and Trevor Davis, but nothing like what true returners Desmond Howard and Allen Rossum gave them in the ‘90s.
They have had 13 punters dating to the 2000 season and eight of them lasted no longer than two years. The longest tenured punter was Tim Masthay (2010-15) and next in line is Josh Bidwell (2000-03). None of the 13 punters made the Pro Bowl.
The club has a long history of draft busts at the position, starting with Ray Stachowicz (third round, 1981) and including B.J. Sander (third, 2004) and JK Scott (fifth, 2018).
The long-snapping position was once ironclad with Rob Davis (’97-07) holding down the position for more than a decade and Brett Goode (’08-17) carrying it for 10 more years. But since ’17, the Packers have had five long snappers, including two in ’21, one of which – Hunter Bradley – was a 2018 seventh-round draft pick.
And then there is the coaching.
The Packers are notoriously cheap when it comes to paying special teams coaches and never competed for the best on the market.
John Bonamego, who went on to have a long NFL career, had been a special teams coach for one season when Mike Sherman hired him in ’03. After Sherman was fired, head coach Mike McCarthy brought in longtime veteran Mike Stock, but he was 67 and had been out of the game for a year (he has the Packers' only top-10 finish in the Gosselin rankings since ’07).
After the Packers ranked 32nd in ’08, McCarthy fired Stock and hired Shawn Slocum, who had spent three years as an assistant under Stock and was in the college ranks before that. After six seasons and an average rank of 23rd, McCarthy fired Slocum.
He then hired Ron Zook, who had vast experience as a college head coach and six years of experience in the NFL but hadn’t coached special teams since 1998. His average ranking was 23rd and he was fired after the ’18 season.
The Packers’ best chance to turn their special teams around occurred after LaFleur was named head coach and Miami’s Darren Rizzi was looking for a job. The two had a great meeting at the Packers’ facility and Rizzi liked the thought of being LaFleur’s right-hand man, someone who could not only fix the special teams but help with game management.
The Packers' front office, schooled by former GM Ted Thompson to avoid overpaying on special teams, treated talks with Rizzi as a negotiation instead of laying out the red carpet and agreeing to pay $1.5 million per year right away.
Rizzi came with the impression that the salary was agreed upon and left feeling the Packers weren’t serious. He accepted the same amount from New Orleans and over the past three years his units’ average rank has been 3.67, tops in the NFL.
He has one year left on his contract and will interview with the Saints for their open head-coaching position. Although he is not expected to get it, the Saints will likely retain him no matter what happens with the head coach position.
Now that Drayton has been relieved of his duties, LaFleur and the front office must score big on his replacement.
The top candidates who have been available since the end of the season are Chicago’s Chris Tabor, Las Vegas Raiders interim coach Rich Bisaccia, former New York Giants head coach Joe Judge and his assistant Thomas McGaughey, Houston’s Frank Ross, Miami’s Danny Crossman, Denver’s Tom McMahon, Minnesota’s Ryan Fickman and former Atlanta coordinator Ben Kotwicka.
Tabor has since taken a job in Carolina and McCaughey, Ross and Crossman are returning to their former positions, according to a source with connections to the NFL’s close-knit special teams community.
McMahon was Drayton’s boss in Indianapolis so he won’t be hired, Fickman isn’t considered among the better and more experienced coaches of the group and Kotwicka has been out of the league for a year.
If LaFleur and president Mark Murphy are serious about improving their special teams, they need to make an all-out run at either Bisaccia or Judge, who both have long track records as excellent special teams coaches. Bisaccia is already drawing interest from the Bears and others, who are waiting to see if the Jacksonville Jaguars hire him as a head coach.
The Bears aren’t big spenders and so this is Murphy’s chance to show his commitment to special teams and allow LaFleur to make a lavish offer to Bisaccia. He may have to blow the other offers out of the water, but it would be worth it given how badly LaFleur needs to fix special teams, regardless of what happens with Aaron Rodgers.
LaFleur will be in Las Vegas this week coaching the NFC in the Pro Bowl, so he should have an opportunity to meet with Bisaccia multiple times.
In the case of Judge, it’s not about money. The Giants still owe him his coaching salary and so the Packers can make a modest offer and let New York pay the rest. They will have to put on a full-court press if they want to lure him back into special teams.
They will have to prove to him they are serious about that part of the game and will take his recommendations seriously, instead of ignoring them as a source said they often did with Drayton.
If the Packers don’t go big, then they might as well have kept Drayton and hired a veteran special teams assistant who could have helped him grow into the position. He deserved far more support than he got, but now that the decision is made it’s up to the organization to go all-in on special teams.