As the Green Bay Packers are negotiating with head coach Matt LaFleur for what seems to be a rather inevitable extension, I find myself increasingly annoyed by the organization. Not because of a LaFleuer extension, no, I am on board with that. It’s everything surrounding it, which mostly comes down to the Packers being cheap. The Packers are not cheap like how the Cincinnati Bengals are cheap. By all accounts, their front office is well-staffed. The Packers are more than happy to spend cash on the roster. They fully leveraged the end of the Aaron Rodgers era, and they’ve put their money where their mouth is for Jordan Love’s prime. It’s the coaching spend.
If you allow me to take a trip down my formal training lane, labor costs are going to be well-correlated to labor quality, in the aggregate. This isn’t necessarily true in markets with severe distortions, like the market for professional sports players, where drafts, league minimums or maximums, and collectively bargained nuances wittle away at the typical efficiencies seen in broader labor markets, but the NFL coaching market doesn’t work like that. There’s no salary cap on coaches. There are certainly industry standards for pay, but that’s true in almost every industry. And how does Green Bay approach these industry standards?
Allegedly not very well. In fact, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, the coach spending standards in Green Bay are part of the problem of the negotiation, not just for LaFleur himself, but for what he can spend on his staff.
They have certain budgets that they want to stay within and certain money allocations they’re used to spending. You know, as an example, the New York Giants are paying Brian Daboll, I don’t know the exact number, but let’s just call it $7 million a year. If they want to go hire John Harbaugh, are they going to pay double or triple that? Yesterday’s prices are not today’s prices. You want to get the best of the best? You’re gonna have to pay for that.
I don’t know exactly what Matt makes right now, but if the Packers want to go hire John Harbaugh, they might end up paying close to double in salary. Double.
Our own Justis Mosqueda outlined the severe lack of external experience on the staff currently, which is especially highlighted on the offensive side of the ball. Green Bay’s hires have been overwhelmingly internal except when forced to look elsewhere. Joe Barry was not technically an external hire, but he worked with LaFleur at a prior job, and by all accounts was not particularly well-compensated (which makes sense given his prior DC record). Only when that failed spectacularly did Green Bay go and make a larger commitment to then Boston College head coach Jeff Hafley. Only after special teams failed spectacularly did they go and spend big on a special teams coordinator in Rich Bisaccia (whose returns have been disappointing, but he’s also been handed mostly bad kickers). Disappointing defensive front returns led to them finally hiring Demarcus Covington rather than perpetual holdovers Jerry Montgomery and Jason Rebrovich. There does seem to be a point where the franchise’s cheap methods fail so resoundingly that they are finally shocked into prioritizing the coaching staff. And I find this incredibly bizarre.
If you are an organization that, as a matter of ideology, is a draft-and-develop organization, the latter part has to actually happen. And if you want the latter part to happen, and you believe in the general accepted laws of labor economics, you should probably be spending *more* than the average team in the NFL on your positional coaching staff, not prioritizing savings there by promoting often-underqualified internal candidates. If you are an organization that relies on the development of the young players you draft, you do not put them in the best position to succeed if you are not providing them with upper-echelon coaches who are working with them on a daily basis.