Green Bay Packers Last 10 Drafts Ranked: No. 7 Class of 2016
By Kenny Jilek
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be counting down the last ten Green Bay Packers’ draft classes. That continues today with the seventh-ranked class, the class of 2016
The rankings will be based on the contributions of each player, and their play for other teams, if they’ve left, will be factored in as well because if they turned out to be a good player, that means it was a good pick. A few quantifying measures we’ll be using are total years of primary starters and Pro Bowl appearances that each class produced, both provided by Football Reference. The issue with this is those are cumulative stats, and the last few classes are still developing and will very likely become starters and make some Pro Bowl appearances, so rankings won’t be solely based on those things.
We’ll also look at yards, tackles, sacks, and other stats, but it’s hard to compare apples to oranges with different positions, so there will be a subjective element as well. The final ranking criteria will be the headliner of each draft and how they stack up against the others. Each draft has at least one Pro Bowler, so it’s easy to pick out. Just like in the last article, we’ll split the players into tiers based on how their careers played out and their contributions.
Green Bay Packers Tier 1: Kenny Clark and Blake Martinez
Kenny Clark is the big headliner of this class and should be as the first-round pick. He’s a strong and disruptive force on the line of scrimmage for the Green Bay Packers and finally got his first Pro Bowl nod in 2019. From 2017 to 2019, he racked up 16.5 sacks and 23 tackles for loss while being mostly the only reliable interior defensive lineman. It’s been hard to find him help in that area, but he’s been good enough to keep the trenches competitive in Green Bay and deserves a lot of credit not just for that but also the pressure he can create on the passer coming from the middle, collapsing the pocket, and not allowing the quarterback to step up.
Blake Martinez, the first of two second-round picks, was another important player to come out of this class. He led the league in tackles in 2017 and was always among league leaders. That didn’t tell the whole story as those tackles were often farther downfield than most would have liked, and he struggled in coverage, but he held down a position that the Packers don’t invest in heavily for three years as they played five defensive backs around him. He also netted the Packers a 4th round compensatory pick, with which they selected Royce Newman, so we’ll see how that works out as well.