GREEN BAY, Wis. - For Green Bay Packers fans who remember the dormant decades before the arrival of Brett Favre, you'll understand the reference.
The most popular player on the team is the backup quarterback.
That made this year's training camp and roster cuts a bit of a throwback. In the court of popular opinion, Kyle McCord 's strong preseason not only should have put him on the roster, but it should have made him the backup behind Jordan Love instead of Tyrod Taylor .
General manager Brian Gutekunst disagreed. Not only will McCord not be the No. 2 quarterback, he's not even on the team after Gutekunst traded him to the Dolphins.
Especially at quarterback, the best player isn't necessarily the most talented player.
Based purely on ability to throw the football with accuracy, make plays downfield and fire the ball into tight windows, is McCord a better quarterback than Taylor?
Maybe.
McCord certainly looked like a legit quarterback in the preseason. He lit up the Cardinals in the preseason finale with four touchdown passes. A 65-yard bomb to Isaiah Neyor that also should have been a touchdown was dropped.
Here's the thing, though, and the Pro Football Focus numbers do a great job of illustrating the premise.
Overall, McCord was 22-of-35 passing for 226 yards against Arizona. However, it looked nothing like what he would encounter in a real game. The keeping-it-vanilla Cardinals blitzed him on only two of 39 dropbacks. He completed one pass for 2 yards and scrambled on the other.
Moreover, benefiting from excellent protection, he faced pressure on only eight dropbacks. He was 3-of-5 passing for 1 yard and was sacked three times. Yes, in eight under-pressure dropbacks, he had a net of negative-26 passing yards.
Now, fast forward to the regular season. After playing a lot of snaps throughout the training camp practices, the No. 2 quarterback gets none - or close to none - during the regular-season practice week. Practice snaps are precious, so Love will get all the reps to get ready for blitz-happy Brian Flores' Vikings defense for Week 1.
So, imagine if Love were to go down against the Vikings.
Who would you want in the game, with nothing to get ready for Flores other than film study and mental reps? Taylor, with 100 career games and more than 2,000 career dropbacks under his belt? Or McCord, with zero?
Taylor is entering his 16th season in the NFL. There's nothing he hasn't seen, no blitz he hasn't diagnosed before the snap, no line-of-scrimmage adjustment he couldn't make.
It would be impossible to overstate the importance of that experience, especially for a team that has championship aspirations but also a limited margin for error to get to the playoffs.
So, it stands to reason that general manager Brian Gutekunst had this to say when asked if he considered going with McCord as the backup quarterback.
"No real discussions there about that," Gutekunst said on Tuesday. "They're put into the game in different situations. Tyrod's got a long history that we feel really good about being able to go into a game and handle all the things Matt wants to do.
"He's not going to have to reduce anything because Tyrod's obviously done this for a long time. He's seen everything. And quite frankly, in camp, I thought he performed pretty well. There was really no discussions about that. Kyle did a really nice job, and I think he's got a bright future, but that wasn't where we were with that."
It's not as if Taylor is a rag-armed statue at quarterback. He's toward the end of his career, to be sure, but he can still play. He might not be capable of going out and winning a game, but he's smart enough to not lose a game, either. And that's half the battle.
Green Bay Packers quarterback Tyrod Taylor throws a pass at the Denver Broncos in the preseason. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect
Gutekunst might have gone into final cuts hoping to get McCord onto the practice squad. That possibility disappeared the minute his former second-mate, first-year Dolphins general manager Jon-Eric Sullivan, called Gutekunst and offered a draft pick for McCord.
"When somebody calls you up and starts talking about a trade, I think the likelihood of you getting him to the practice squad's probably not strong," Gutekunst said.
So, that left the Packers with two options. One was to make the trade. Two was to keep McCord as the third quarterback.
A good case can be made for keeping McCord. Good quarterbacks are hard to find. Heck, quarterbacks who might become good quarterbacks are hard to find. Hence, why the Dolphins gave the Packers a sixth-round pick for a player who spent his rookie season on the Eagles' practice squad and the Packers signed to a futures contract at the end of last season.
There's no doubt McCord had a good preseason beyond the obvious of arm talent and playmaking. He showed situational awareness, pocket presence, decision-making and clutch play. Those are all intangibles that make for good quarterbacks.
It's something I've pointed out a few times here and even to McCord and new practice-squad quarterback Kedon Slovis . Taylor is 37 years old and in Green Bay on a one-year contract. There's no guarantee he'll be back for next season. That means this year's No. 3 quarterback could be considered the front-runner to be next year's No. 2 quarterback.
McCord showed enough potential to take that next step. Shoot, in the Dolphins' eyes, he has taken that next step.
"Whenever you trade a player that you like and you think has an upside, that's tough to do," Gutekunst said. "But he wasn't going to be the No. 2 here this year, more than likely. And heading into next year, who knows? So, it's our job to find the next guy and develop the next guy. That's kind of what we do, and that's what we'll do as we go forward."
Gutekunst appears to have an eye for the position. He drafted Love in 2019, traded a measly seventh-round pick for Malik Willis in 2024 and signed McCord in 2026.
Who knows, maybe Slovis will be the next quarterback who raises his stature in Green Bay. Maybe it'll be some other quarterback who becomes available in Week 4. Maybe it'll be another former draft pick, like McCord. Maybe it'll be the 2027 draft.
However, quarterback is the one position where you can't leave anything to chance. It's why Taylor is the backup for this season. He's a known commodity who can help the Packers win games if thrust into action.
Keeping McCord, obviously, would have necessitated another difficult decision. Should the Packers have released their 10th offensive lineman, such as Travis Glover ? Their seventh defensive tackle, such as Anthony Campbell?
I get Gutekunst's sentiment that "big guys ... don't grow on trees" and "very rarely become available," but neither do quarterbacks who might actually be good.
Trading McCord, from a short-term perspective, might have been the right move, especially for a team that's focused on winning now. From a longer-term perspective, though, it's a mistake that could come back to bite them at this time next year.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com/nfl/packers/onsi as Did Packers Botch Backup Quarterback Decision With Kyle McCord? .
