If you weren’t painfully hungover or watching the college football playoffs on New Year’s Day, you probably saw some comments that Green Bay Packers offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich made about first-round rookie receiver Matthew Golden. Let’s not sugarcoat it. Here’s the full exchange:
Reporter: Long-term, what does [Golden] have to do to have a bigger piece of this offense?
Stenavich: I think right now, like, he will. And the good thing is that the last couple of weeks you’ve seen just like his
rapport with [quarterback] Jordan [Love], making plays out in practice. But it’s tough right now. It honestly is because you got Christian [Watson], you got Romeo [Doubs], you got [Jayden Reed] back. These guys have got really good experience and they’re really good players. Those are the guys you’re leaning on right now. I think Golden’s got a really bright future. He’s very talented and his time will come, but I think, right now, with the room the way it is, he’s not gonna be in that premier role when the playoffs come around. But, again, if you told me that he’s the number one receiver on a play, I’d be very excited about it, too. We have a lot of really good options when it comes to wide receiver right now, which is a blessing.
There has been a level of backlash to this, some warranted and some unwarranted (in my opinion, you’re free to feel however you want). So let’s unpack this step by step.
First of all, let’s talk about Golden’s role with the team. At the start of the year, Watson was still rehabbing his 2024 ACL tear, which kept him on the injured reserve until Week 8. Reed, the team’s primary slot receiver over the last three seasons, also went down with a broken collarbone in Week 2, which put him on the injured reserve until Week 14.
When Watson returned, both he and Romeo Doubs took over the majority of the team’s outside receiver snaps. When Reed came back, he returned to his slot receiver role.
For the most part, when Watson and Reed were out of the lineup, both Dontayvion Wicks and Golden, when healthy, had basically split time at outside receiver (Watson) and slot receiver (Reed) as their injury replacements. Now that Watson and Reed are back, Wicks and Golden are essentially splitting the fourth receiver role.
With that being said, that doesn’t mean that Golden is just twiddling his fingers on the bench. Even though he only caught one ball against the Baltimore Ravens last week, Golden played 24 snaps of offense, more than Reed (22) and close to Watson (26) and Doubs (25). As a reminder, Wicks left the game with a concussion after playing just three snaps.
Aside from Davante Adams, who was an All-Pro receiver at the time, Packers head coach Matt LaFleur has really avoided feeding a “number one receiver” in his tenure, and has stated time and time again that his ultimate goal is for defenses to have to fear all the team’s pass-catching options. LaFleur wants his quarterbacks to throw to the open man, based on how the defense reacts, rather than force-feeding pass-catchers just to get the ball in someone’s hands for the sake of getting the ball in someone’s hands.
The next angle of this that I want to talk about is a fairly valid question: Why did the Packers take Golden if the team wasn’t going to use him?
Use him this year is the condition I would throw on this phrase. The Packers aren’t using him this year because they really try to redshirt all rookies — and have ever since they reinstated their draft and develop philosophy with the hiring of Ted Thompson as general manager, following the dreaded Mike Sherman era, when the team finally gave a head coach general manager powers.
Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at every first-round draft pick that the team has made since 2005, when Thompson was hired.
Starts for Packers’ 1st-round picks (since 2005)
- Quay Walker, A.J. Hawk: 16
- Eric Stokes, Darnell Savage: 14
- Clay Matthews III: 13
- Bryan Bulaga: 12
- Jaire Alexander: 11
- Ha Ha Clinton-Dix: 10
- Damarious Randall: 9
- Nick Perry: 5
- Matthew Golden: 4
- Kenny Clark, Justin Harrell: 2
- Jordan Morgan, B.J. Raji: 1
- Lukas Van Ness, Devonte Wyatt, Jordan Love, Rashan Gary, Datone Jones, Derek Sherrod, Aaron Rodgers: 0
In Green Bay, the average first-round pick starts six games as a rookie, including as an injury replacement. That number drops for every round later that a player gets selected. Golden is at four starts right now and will probably get a fifth on Sunday, with the team wanting to bench veteran players in a “meaningless” game to end the regular season.
So…that’s about the average outcome for the Packers, honestly.
In Green Bay, the team doesn’t draft players for immediate impact. They draft players so that down the line, when they need to pay veterans, they don’t have to spend their cap space on a more limited (and expensive) pool of veteran free agents (See: Banks, Aaron.) That’s why the team takes big swings on athletes, and it’s why the team generally makes the playoffs year over year.
Here’s where I could go on a 2,000-word rant about how general manager Brian Gutekunst learned from Ted Thompson, who learned from Ron Wolf, who learned from Al Davis, the ultimate “draft the big, fast, strong player” thinker in NFL history, but I will save you the time.
The Packers only picked inside the top 10 selections twice (Raji in 2009 and Hawk in 2006) since 1992, the year after Wolf took over the team and reshaped the franchise in his image, which the team has essentially continued, other than a four-year stint when Sherman was coaching and the top decision maker in the front office. They view this way of drafting as their best path to playoff sustainability, rather than having shorter, brighter burns on the top end and having to completely rip the team down to the studs once the burn is over.
So, when can we expect Golden to really start going in Green Bay? Probably 2027, honestly. While Doubs is a free agent this offseason, Watson (who is ahead of Golden on the depth chart at outside receiver), Reed (who is ahead of Golden on the depth chart at slot receiver) and Wicks (who has split roles with Golden) are all in contract years in 2026. Remember, the team spent another top-100 pick on another receiver, Savion Williams, who is buried even further down the depth chart than Golden.
The front office is really just drafting who they view as the best player available from a developmental standpoint and then leaving it up to the coaches to decide when to get them on the field. Usually, an injury, an outgoing contract or a developmental bust is what ends up pushing players up the depth chart.
Golden got more opportunities at the start of the year because Watson and Reed were out, and those opportunities became more limited when the room got healthier. It’s going to be a pretty crowded room until 2027, which is when Golden will probably become a 17-game starter (assuming he stays healthy) for the first time. That’s really the full story here.
If you’ve been following the Packers for the last 20-plus years (or even longer), it shouldn’t be a surprise that they aren’t giving a starting role to a rookie. That seldom happens here. They’re always drafting for the future, not the present roster.
