Trillions of words have been spilled about Brian Gutekunst’s draft history this season. The common refrain is that his picks have strongly outperformed in rounds two and four through seven, he recently broke the third-round pick curse and his first-round picks suck. There’s truth to all of those things, but it’s not as bad as it may seem. Let’s get into it. I’ll focus on the first-round picks in this article.

Evaluation Criteria

I will evaluate each of Gute’s picks in a binary fashion – hit or miss. First-round picks in the NFL are extremely valuable. While we will talk about some of the picks that became role players but not true hits, the most honest way to evaluate Gutekunst is through the number of hits he’s had.

Here’s what I’m looking for in a hit: a star player who provides value during his rookie contract and then is an obvious candidate for a big second contract. I don’t think this will be hard to do – either a player was obviously worth the first-round pick or they weren’t.

Here are my grades:

Brian Gutekunst’s Draft History: Misses

The misses are definitely plentiful. In Gute’s credit, basically, none of them were complete busts – each of those players (and I expect Lukas Van Ness to develop into this) was a positive player on the field at least at some point in his Packers career.

Darnell Savage and Eric Stokes were athletic freak defensive backs who shined early and then became bad. Savage because of scheme and Stokes because of injuries and lack of COD ability.

Wyatt is probably the most arguable of these – when he’s on he has a top interior pass rush win rate, but in my opinion if you’re going to bet on a “reformed” abuser they should at least be dominant. Walker just doesn’t look like he knows what he’s doing half the time.

Savage is already off the team, Stokes will be this off-season and there’s no reason, right now, to think the other three won’t be when their time comes. Maybe the Packers convert Quay Walker to edge rusher and he becomes an impact player. Maybe Wyatt puts it together but he’d already be 28. Maybe Van Ness develops after wasting his rookie deal. Right now you have to count them all as misses because the Packers basically won’t get any surplus value from them.

Brian Gutekunst’s Draft History: The Hits

In the Packers down times this season, the problem has been that even the hits are playing badly. Rashan Gary couldn’t buy a pressure in the first half of the season, Jaire Alexander is always hurt and Jordan Love throws a pick almost every game.

The good news is that Gary seems to be turning the corner and Love is throwing fewer rocket balls. Jaire is still hurt, of course, but at least we know what it is?

The Packers surely won’t be carried by any of their first-round misses over the last third of the season, so the hits really need to pick it up.

The Evaluation

I looked at each of the picks in the spots the Packers have had in the draft over Biran Gutekunst’s tenure and determined a very subjective average hit rate for each pick number. We can use that percentage to determine how many hits Gutekunst should have had with his picks over the past six years. Here’s what I came up with:

Don’t nominate me for a Nobel or anything because of this statistical analysis which was about as barebones as it gets and obviously came from a small sample size (see pick 26 being four times better than pick 22).

Let’s run through how it works again. For pick number 13, which the Packers had in 2023 when they drafted Lukas Van Ness, NFL teams had a hit about 67% of the time in all the drafts going back to 2018. That means as part of our weighted average, we can add 0.67 picks to the total. When you add each number up, you get 4.00, take out pick 25, which was for Jordan Morgan who is currently an incomplete, and you get 3.50 expected hits over Brian Gutekunst’s draft tenure.

That’s half a pick more than his actual hits. If he had taken Christina Gonzalez instead of Lukas Van Ness or Jevon Holland instead of Eric Stokes would we even be having this conversation?

We know Gutekunst’s draft strategy and that he filters out non-athletes and bad characters guys liberally – many of the fandom’s most wanted draft picks may not have even been on the board (see: George Pickens).

The problem right now is that he has missed at least four in a row and Jordan Morgan was taken this off-season despite the line already having plus starters at each spot and despite the fact that Cooper Dejean was still on the board. There is a definite recency bias affecting the minds of Packers fans when it comes to Brian Gutekunst first-round pick angst.

I will say that it would be good to have some reversion to the mean next season. Can’t have your last good first-round pick be five years ago.

Mike Price is a lifelong Packers fan currently living in Utah. You can follow him on twitter at @themikeprice.

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