Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Packer Plus
Quietly rewarded for Packers’ success
Green Bay — Green Bay Packers president Mark Murphy wouldn’t say it directly, but when asked about the status of contract extensions for general manager Brian Gutekunst, coach Matt LaFleur and executive vice president of football operations Russ Ball, he stopped short of saying all three deals were completed.
“I’ll just say, I’m confident that not only Matt and Brian, but also Russ Ball will continue to be Packers employees for years to come,” Murphy said at a news conference shortly after addressing more than 8,000 people at the annual shareholders meeting inside Lambeau Field on Monday.
ESPN later reported and PackersNews.com confirmed that all three had indeed signed new deals.
During the meeting, Murphy praised the job Gutekunst, LaFleur and Ball had done in guiding the Packers to the best regular-season record (39-10) in the NFL over the past three seasons, three playoff appearances, including two NFC championship games, and keeping them out of a rebuilding mode despite considerable salary-cap hurdles needed to be cleared this past offseason.
But he mostly played dodgeball with questions about the extensions.
“That’s something I prefer to keep internal,” Murphy said when asked directly about the Gutekunst and LaFleur contracts. “But obviously, you can see from my comments, I feel like they’re doing an outstanding job.”
Reminded that they have typically announced extensions for their general manager and coaches, Murphy said, “No, not always.” However, other than a one-year extension Mike McCarthy signed in 2018, the club had announced extensions with both McCarthy and general manager Ted Thompson in ’14 and McCarthy in ’11.
Murphy couldn’t have forgotten those instances given he was the team president for all of them, but he made it
seem like it was team policy not to announce the deals.
Had Murphy made the announcement to the shareholders of deals that were expected to be done this off-season as all three approached the final year (Gutekunst and Ball) or two years (LaFleur) of their contracts, it would have turned an otherwise mundane meeting into a blast off toward the 2022 season, which starts in earnest Wednesday with the first training camp practice of the year.
Given past instances of announcing extensions and the feather it would have been in his cap after hiring Gutekunst in ’18 and leading the search committee that chose LaFleur in ’19, Murphy may have been deferring to the wishes of the three men not to announce the
deals.
Regardless, the new deals are rewards for guiding the Packers through one of the most successful eras of their existence. The only thing missing has been a Super Bowl appearance and victory as McCarthy and Thompson produced in 2010 and Mike Holmgren and Ron Wolf produced in ’96 and ’97 (lost in the Super Bowl XXXII).
It’s unclear how much Gutekunst’s contract called for him to him make this season, but as a first-time general manager when hired in 2018, his salary was likely in the $1.5 million-a-year range. LaFleur signed what a source told PackersNews in 2019 was a four-year deal worth around $5 million year and included a fifth-year club option.
LaFleur’s salary put him somewhere in the middle of the league, according to published reports, and was far less than the $8 million McCarthy was making at the end of his tenure. The way coaching salaries have been skyrocketing, LaFleur’s deal likely jumped considerably.
Though LaFleur technically had two years left on his deal, the Packers were getting a bargain for someone who has gone 39-10 in the regular season, setting the all-time NFL mark for victories in the first three seasons of a coaching career. The Packers haven’t lost consecutive games under LaFleur and has led the team to a 22-2 record at home.
The playoffs haven’t been as successful; the Packers lost twice in the NFC Championship Game and once in the divisional round after 13-win regular seasons.
Gutekunst has been instrumental in building a roster that has kept the Packers in contention each of the last three years and should keep them in contention again this year. Though he was mostly responsible for the off-season clash with quarterback Aaron Rodgers before the 2020 season, he managed to repair the relationship enough that Rodgers signed a massive contract extension in February that could keep him under center until he decides to retire.
Gutekunst has used a combination of free agency and the draft to keep the Packers at the top. He invested heavily in defense the past two seasons despite being forced to trade all-pro wide receiver Davante Adams in the offseason and will be on the spot if the Packers suffer a big drop-off offensively.
Ball has been instrumental in manipulating the salary cap to keep the Packers’ roster intact. The most difficult job he had was structuring a deal that would allow the Packers to pay Rodgers $150 million over three years without causing massive cuts to get under the salary cap.
He did it with an unusual structure that guarantees money as the contract goes along and could result in Rodgers playing just one more year without too much damage to the salary cap. The Packers go into the season with $16 million in cap room, but in the coming years they will need the cap to increase dramatically because of all the charges they pushed off into the future.