This year is an outlier in terms of how the Packers are handling their pre-draft visits.
The Packers love their pre-draft visits. It’s an open secret that one or more of the players selected by the Packers next weekend will come from the list of guys who they’ve invited to Green Bay as a part of their top 30 visits, and a few more will end up with the Packers as undrafted free agents. In fact, it’s so well known it’s hardly a secret at all.
But there are still some less obvious trends in the ways the Packers use their pre-draft visits. Using previous reporting from Acme Packing Company and other sources, I’ve compiled what I think is close to a comprehensive list of every pre-draft visit the Packers have had since 2015, adding in a little extra data that I think is worth exploring.
The first breakdown is by position. Tracking positional visit trends shows us where the Packers are leaning in a given year. I went into some depth with their wide receiver visit history yesterday, but the same holds true at other spots as well. In 2023, for instance, the Packers hosted six tight ends for visits and ultimately selected two: Luke Musgrave and Tucker Kraft. Interestingly enough, neither Musgrave nor Kraft was among their pre-draft visits, but Ben Sims, later added via waivers, was. Suffice it to say, the Packers were doing a lot of work on tight ends that year, and they had added three from the 2023 draft class by the start of the season.
The Packers also went heavy on offensive line visits in both 2022 and 2024, and took three linemen each year.
If the past is any indication, the Packers are leaning toward wide receivers and offensive linemen on offense (six visits apiece) and edge rushers and cornerbacks on defense (five each) this season.
But it’s also worth noting that the kind of player the Packers are targeting with their pre-draft visits is changing. While the Packers used to use their pre-draft visits as a sort of undrafted free agent recruiting session, today they’re much more focused on high-end prospects.
In my visit spreadsheet, I’ve added data on the final rankings from the NFL Mock Draft Database consensus big board for every player invited for a visit. So far this year (and the rankings are constantly changing, so this may not be up-to-the-minute accurate), the players the Packers have invited for visits have an average ranking of 122.5 on the big board, by far the highest ranking for any non-pandemic year we have in our data.
Compare that to 2016 and 2017, the only two years of the Ted Thompson era for which we have data, where the pre-draft visitors had an average ranking of 266.73 and 259.88, respectively. And the actual rankings might be even lower. In 2017 alone, the Packers invited 14 players who weren’t ranked on the consensus big board in for a visit. If you could put a number on those players, they’d definitely drag the average down.
To contextualize that a little, I’ve added a “likely undrafted free agent” ranking to the data. If a player has a ranking of 225 or worse on the consensus big board, I’ve considered him a likely UDFA for our purposes. Maybe that’s a stretch; the draft is about 250 picks long. But I think it accomplishes our purposes.
Using that definition, the Packers haven’t had more than 14 likely UDFAs in for a visit in the past six years. They’ve invited just seven in for visits so far this year. It seems safe to say the Packers are spending a lot more time looking into high-end prospects this season than they have recently.
You can click around the data for yourself here, but as one last note, I think the way the Packers handled the 2020 and 2021 drafts is informative. Those seasons, with all-virtual visits due to the pandemic, the Packers focused almost exclusively on high-end prospects. The Packers only interviewed 10 total likely UDFAs between those years, instead spending their time with players that seemed likely to be drafted. That approach made a lot of sense for the time: with uncertain information out there due to COVID-shortened seasons and incomplete data, the Packers tried their best to nail the top end of the draft. Unfortunately, that approach failed — outside of Jordan Love, the Packers didn’t get much in the way of returns from either of those classes. But their urgency is, I think, instructive.
Brian Gutekunst has spoken about a need for urgency this offseason at all levels of the organization, and I think the Packers’ approach to their pre-draft visits reflects that urgency. When times have been uncertain in the past, the Packers buckled down and focused almost exclusively on the best of the best. They seem to be doing the same today. That’s a pretty good indication of how Gutekunst is thinking about this year’s draft: he wants results, and fast.