Every year we have a natural tendency to “grade” the Packers’ draft picks, usually by asking ourselves whether it was the person we would have taken at each spot. That’s fun for fueling debates with friends, but let’s be honest: neither we nor self-appointed media pundits are qualified to grade the Packers’ scouts and coaches. Our careers and reputations don’t depend on finding the right players to help the team win football games. Theirs do. Each spring they spend most of their waking hours thinking about who those players might be—and which ones the team needs most.
The more informative question isn’t who we thought they should have taken at different spots, but why they took the players they did.