As we inch closer toward the end of the Green Bay Packers’ season, it seems more and more clear that Packers president and CEO Ed Policy plans to bring both head coach Matt LaFleur and general manager Brian Gutekunst back in 2026, despite electing not extend either in his first summer as the pseudo-owner of the team.
In his column to start the new year on Packers.com, Policy stated that he was “extremely proud” of the 2025 team and noted that the squad battled through injuries this year. As of now,
Green Bay has 17 players on the injured reserve or physically unable to perform lists, after changing over their training staff in 2024. In Week 18 alone, the Packers’ front office had to make 23 roster moves just to field a team against the Minnesota Vikings in a game that had no consequence on Green Bay’s playoff standing.
Before that post, ESPN’s Rob Demovsky stated that he believes the Packers will go back to the team’s “old structure,” where the head coach directly reports to the general manager, instead of the head coach and general manager both reporting to the president/CEO independently. This, obviously, would be a pretty big boost for Gutekunst, who Demovsky claimed he assumes will be the GM in 2026.
So now that we’ve set this table, here’s what ESPN’s Adam Schefter had to say about LaFleur’s situation on Monday:
“I think the bigger deal is, can they figure out a contract of fair value to keep him there? I think that’s what this is about, them trying to negotiate a contract, seeing what they could come up with. If they get a deal done, it’s a non-talking point and his future is secure there. If they can’t figure out a contract that works for both sides, well then, you have to ask yourself, are they willing to let him go into the last year of his deal, which he would be, or what do you do about that?
Very rarely do teams want coaches going into the last year of their deal. Which, I believe the priority will be to re-sign to an extension this offseason.”
Schefter also added that he expects Gutekunst to receive a contract extension, too.
The way information is trickling out, it seems like Policy never really put LaFleur and Gutekunst on the hot seat. First of all, I’ve been told that Gutekunst’s job was never on the line this year, and the issue was really an extension for LaFleur — and what the optics would look like if you extended one and not the other. Secondly, it seems like Policy likes the idea of LaFleur being the head coach, based on Schefter’s comments, but is simply balking at the price of business of extending NFL head coaches in this era.
This…is unfortunately a common trope in Green Bay. Sometimes the team hires a pricey coordinator or two, but rarely, from conversations I’ve had with people in the league, does the team have an expensive coaching staff as a whole.
Let’s go through a couple of examples.
When LaFleur was hired, he was a one-year play-caller for a 2018 Tennessee Titans team that went 9-7 and finished third in the AFC South. When the Packers brought him in as head coach, he was paid $5 million per year, which is on the low scale for first-time head coaches at the NFL level (Chicago’s Ben Johnson is making $13 million per year, for example). For perspective, 47 coaches were making $5 million or more at the college level in 2025, including programs like Liberty, a member of Conference USA — whose conference champion, Kennesaw State, played in the Myrtle Beach Bowl this year.
I was also told that part of the condition of LaFleur taking over as head coach in 2019 was that the deal was that he had to accept that the team was going to keep Mike Pettine’s defensive staff, as the team didn’t have the appetite for paying all of those coaching buyouts just to turn around and pay for a second staff (NFL coaching contracts are structurally guaranteed).
Once you’ve wrapped your mind around that, you can look up the Packers’ recent coaching staff changes and note the types of coaches who end up backfilling for when Green Bay’s coaches leave for promotions elsewhere. Hint: They’re usually cheap internal promotions.
For example, the Packers’ current receivers coach, Ryan Mahaffey, was promoted from his previous role on the team when Jason Vrable, previously the receivers coach, began serving as the passing game coordinator full-time in 2024. Mahaffey’s previous job? Assistant offensive line coach, a role under Luke Butkus.
While NFL coaching salaries aren’t public (and I can never get a clear answer why agents don’t want to drive up the prices with the media the same way they do with players, other than “that’s just not industry standard”), the one thing I’ve been told over and over again (and written about here for years) is that the general vibes in Green Bay is not to go out and spend money on coaches when the staff shakes up, but rather ask who the next man up is for a cheaper internal promotion option.
LaFleur’s first special teams coordinator? Shawn Mennenga, who had only spent one year as a special teams coordinator in his career, a season at Vanderbilt, before taking the job. After that, it was Maurice Drayton, an internal promotion from the Mennenga staff after Mennenga was fired. It took hiring a third special teams coordinator in LaFleur’s first four years for the Packers to accept that they needed to spend at the position, which they did when they hired Rich Bisaccia. As a reminder, it’s been widely reported that Darren Rizzi, currently the assistant head coach and special teams coordinator of the AFC’s top-ranked Denver Broncos, was willing to take the Packers’ job on LaFleur’s first staff, but the team low-balled him. Mennenga was cheaper.
Offensively, the team has been pretty cheap for coaches across the board in the LaFleur era, mostly relying on internal promotions and the development of young coaches in their system. Defensively, the team will spend, but only after learning a hard lesson, like post-Joe Barry when the Packers bought defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley, a sitting college football head coach, a very well-respected linebackers coach in Anthony Campanile, who is now the defensive coordinator with the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Derrick Ansley, currently Green Bay’s defensive passing game coordinator who was the Los Angeles Chargers’ defensive coordinator in 2023.
In 2025, they even hired DeMarcus Covington, formerly the New England Patriots’ defensive coordinator, to make up for the mistake of continuously keeping Jerry Montgomery, who survived three different defensive coordinator firings, on the staff as their defensive line coach and replacing him with an internal promotion of Jason Rebrovich. Montgomery is currently the defensive line coach of the Cincinnati Bengals, who rank 30th in defensive DVOA this year, while Rebrovich is the assistant defensive line coach (the assistant to the assistant coach) with the Buffalo Bills.
(Side note: All of this cheap internal hiring is why I expect one of Ansley or Covington to be Hafley’s successor in Green Bay, if he ever leaves for a head coaching opportunity.)
I could list more examples here (Joe Barry wasn’t a hot candidate in 2021 when the Packers had to pay a new defensive coordinator after buying out Mike Pettine), but I won’t (MIKE HOLMGREN LEFT A YEAR AFTER GOING TO BACK-TO-BACK SUPER BOWLS FOR GOD’S SAKE).
In short, this entire dispute doesn’t seem to be about it being a make-or-break season regarding LaFleur’s future in Green Bay as much as it is about the expected cost point of coaches in Green Bay. While the Packers don’t have a billionaire owner syphoning off funds to line his own pockets, the team’s rainy day fund “only” grew by $43 million last season (2024). For perspective, Green Bay has spent $29 million more on players in 2025 than they did in 2024, and the Cleveland Browns have spent $362 million more in cash, for players alone, than the Los Angeles Rams since the pandemic. Millions sound a lot until things start costing millions.
As much as you’d think that the team would be making hand over fist without a billionaire owner, that’s not really how it works. The Packers could blow their financial situation pretty quickly in a league where teams are borrowing from future cap situations regularly (only normal post-Covid), and the cap is rising about $25 million per year. It’s not like the price of facilities or coaching staffs are going down, either.
The prospect for owners to spend above their means is that they’re seeing increases in franchise valuation down the line that justifies the spending, as that dollar figure becomes worth it…once they eventually sell. For example, the Buffalo Bills sold for $1.4 billion about a decade ago. Now, it would take four times that cost to buy an NFL franchise. American sports franchises are one of the safest and most profitable returns on investments in the world, if you have the money.
But Green Bay won’t, and can’t, ever sell 6.2 percent of the club for a cash injection of more than half-billion dollars (more than 12 times what the Packers added to their rainy day fund last year), as the San Francisco 49ers did in May.
Unfortunately, I think we’re headed down the path where the franchise looks around and says, “Hey, we need to be cheap on coaching to keep up with the NFL everywhere else,” a common theme in the Packers’ past, and seemingly the crux of the entire LaFleur non-extension.
