The Green Bay Packers have an issue, sort of. “Champagne problems,” is how former Packers DC Joe Barry put the issue of having too many playmakers to keep on the field when cornerback Eric Stokes made his return last season. The Packers are staring down the fact that they have four playmaking wide receivers who haven’t naturally sorted themselves out in any real order through their abilities on the field.

Jayden Reed and Dontayvion Wicks were drafted in 2023. Christian Watson and Romeo Doubs were drafted in 2022. All four of these extremely young players have proven to be consistent and reliable at various different points throughout the last two seasons.

So great, there’s a bunch of good players at this position, what’s the issue? Malik Heath and Bo Melton also had to step up in certain moments last season, and they usually rose to the occasion as well. So now we see that there are six young and capable receivers on this roster, and there’s not really room for much more than that.

Drafting a receiver in the third or fourth round to get them onto the 53-man roster and see what they’re made of does not really present itself as an incredibly realistic opportunity. Of course, the Packers could just part ways with Samori Toure and elect to keep seven WRs on the 53, but this is where the “issues” come along.

Now of course, this is merely a recognition of the difficulties in managing a football roster, obviously the receiver room in Green Bay is anything but an “issue,” but some a little bit of cost-benefit analysis comes into play here.

What to Consider:

The first issue to consider is: who gets out on the field? This is a good problem to have of course, but in what world should Dontayvion Wicks not receive a starter’s load of offensive snaps? The answer is of course to switch receivers out as often as necessary to not only keep them fresh, but to identify who the “hot hand” is on a particular day in order to unlock the possibility to cater towards that player. So, problem solved; what else?

If the Packers really take the path of “best player available” in the draft later this month, and a wide receiver is the choice for one of their league high eleven draft picks, what happens?

Malik Heath, who is all but locked in as the fifth spot in the wide receiver room, is by no means expendable at this point in his young career. He played more snaps on special teams than any WR on the Packers in 2023, and he played on nearly a quarter of offensive snaps last year, the majority of which came in the latter half of the season when they were vying for a playoff spot.

The Packers can’t afford to crowd their wide receiver room when they’ll have competition at so many other spots on the roster, and we’ve seen them start the season with six or fewer receivers four times over the past five years. If they take a receiver in the draft, which General Manager Brian Gutekunst has elected to do nine times during his six year tenure, it might mean that we’ll see Samori Toure and possibly even Bo Melton left off of the initial 53 man roster going into 2024.

All of this is just to say, even when a team has a strong point, as the Packers do with their receiver room, it can still cause headaches for the front office who has to consider every possibility to make the team successful now and in the future.

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Zack is a college student and cheesehead from California. When he’s not in class or writing, you can find him talking about the Packers on Twitter at @Zack_Upchurch.

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