It’s Green Bay Week at The MMQB

It’s Green Bay Week at The MMQB: Our staffers are embedded for a game week, doing a deep dive into the NFL’s most tightly knit community. We’ll explore the dynamic between the players and the people of Green Bay and provide a glimpse into what makes it a bucket-list destination for football fans. Follow on Twitter for updates, Facebook for live streams, and Instagram for our “Humans of Green Bay” project.
An NFL tradition like no other started in 1993, when Packers safety LeRoy Butler scored a touchdown and celebrated by spontaneously jumping into the stands. Since then, every Packers player has looked forward to taking his own Lambeau Leap, a rite of passage so revered that it remains untouchable during an era in which the excessive celebration penalty flags get thrown around like parade candy. But the Leap isn’t as simple as it looks. Misjudge your timing by a hair and you’ll find yourself desperately climbing the wall, legs flailing, and praying that the fans above you are strong enough to hoist you up. And if you do mess it up, your blooper reel will be shown in team meetings throughout next week for every teammate to critique your effort.cheap NFL jerseys from China,

GREEN BAY, Wis. — Once upon a time, Packers defensive line coach Greg Blache was the only assistant coach/team barber in the NFL. It was the late ’80s, and it didn’t take long for Green Bay’s new defensive line coach to realize that the team’s African-American players were regularly driving 120 miles south to Milwaukee just to get lines and fades unavailable in Titletown. So Blache, who’d made extra cash cutting hair in college at Notre Dame, began plying his second craft at the Packers facility. Occasionally players who neither trusted Blache’s skills nor wanted to make the drive south could turn to a barber from Milwaukee who made semi-regular trips to Green Bay. He was there, Blache remembers, to cut the hair of inmates at the local prison.wholesale jerseys online,
“We had black guys on the team, but it was still the whitest community in the NFL,” Blache, now retired, says from his home outside of Green Bay. “If you were black in Green Bay, they just thought you were a Packer.”
In the first version of NFL free agency, a player only moved on to a new locale when the team that drafted him wanted nothing more to do with him; in that climate the Packers were getting the dregs of the dregs. In 1992 a man nicknamed “the Minister of Defense” led an antitrust lawsuit against the league that resulted in true free agency. That was great for players—after their rookie contract ended, they could now offer their services to any team in the league, choosing the town in which they wanted to play—but it sent a chill through the scouts and personnel men employed by the most successful NFL franchise of the league’s first seven decades. Thanks to free agency, the task of assembling a competitive roster in small-town Wisconsin was about to get significantly tougher.Wholesale Dallas Cowboys Jerseys,
“Among players, Green Bay was depicted as some Russian place where you go and no one ever hears from you,” says former NFL tight end Keith Jackson, a first-round draft pick of the Eagles in 1988 who would go on to play for the Dolphins and the Packers.