Green Bay Packers Last 10 Drafts Ranked: No. 5 Class of 2018
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 fifth-ranked class, the one from 2018
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 – Jaire Alexander and Marquez Valdes-Scantling
Jaire Alexander does a lot of heavy lifting for this class. For what he’s been in three years and what he’s shaping up to be, he is one of the top draft headliners of the past 10 years. He’s already sniffing first-team All-Pro and made his first Pro Bowl in 2020 at age 23. He was rated a ridiculous 90.5 by Pro Football Focus while allowing a 51.3 percent catch rate when targeted and a 67.4 passer rating. Teams started wisely avoiding him as he was targeted less in his latest season than both of his first two, even though he was always defending the league’s top receivers. He sticks like glue in man coverage and refuses to be beat.
He’s the undisputed gem of this Green Bay Packers’ draft class. If he’s not already a premier corner in this league, he will be very soon. As long as we’re talking about his selection in the first round, it’s also worth mentioning the gymnastics done on draft night by Brian Gutekunst to net them an extra first-round pick the next season, which got them, Darnell Savage.
Marquez Valdes-Scantling has been a somewhat polarizing figure in Green Bay for the past three seasons with his shaky hands, but his production can’t be denied. He’s averaging 574 yards per season and put up a career-high 690 in 2020, also scoring six touchdowns. In addition to that, he led the league in yards per reception at 20.9, cementing him as one of the most explosive deep threats in the league. His career up to this point is fairly similar to that of Robby Anderson, who was only a deep threat until this past season when he went to Carolina and upped his catch rate from 54.2 in his four years with the Jets to 69.9 percent with the Panthers. If Valdes-Scantling can make a jump even anywhere close to that, he’ll be a star.