Q&A: Ron Wolf relives the greatest reclamation project in NFL history

How the Hall of Fame general manager woke the Green Bay Packers from the dead still serves as a blueprint for teams wandering in the football wilderness today. Here's our conversation.

Go Long

Good morning! You can watch or listen to episode three of “How the NFL Works” with Ron Wolf right here.

Our conversation in written Q&A form is below.

Wolf is exceptionally open. The Pro Football Hall of Famer explains exactly how he brought the Green Bay Packers back… and his words still ring so true three decades later. As several teams stammer through this early stretch of the 2024 NFL season, GMs across the league sure could heed his advice.

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This is Ron Wolf, Pro Football Hall of Famer, a man who is as humble as he is significant and legendary to the sport itself. He’s not going to sing his own praise and rattle off his own accolades, but Bob Harlan has called you the “savior” of the franchise. Brett Favre has said nobody deserves more credit for turning the Green Bay Packers around, and I think there’s many listeners who completely agree. Ron Wolf, thank you so much for hanging out with us here.

Wolf: Well, very nice you to have me on. Appreciate the opportunity.

How’s life, how’s retirement? Are you able to relax and get away from this crazy game a little bit?

Wolf: I’m really away from the game with the exception — our son, Eliot, is involved with the Patriots and if anybody’s a football fan, they know they’re not doing too well. So that kind of occupies my time, to see how they’re doing. But other than that, it’s kind of nice to be away.

Eliot had the keen eye to know that Baker Mayfield was a talent before most people and now we’re seeing the real Baker Mayfield. So maybe he was onto something there and maybe he’s onto something with Drake Maye. I think he’ll get that thing turned around in New England. It takes a little time.

Wolf: Yeah, hopefully that’s true. You’re only as good as the players you pick, so if you’re no good, you’re going to be fired.

I’ve had so many conversations with general managers and coaches — Joe Schoen, Terry Fontenot (and Brandon Beane), many people running these teams and they try to find that secret sauce. When you become a general manager, there’s probably a reason you’re the GM. The team was in a bad state of affairs. What does it take to turn that thing around? It’s picking the right players, but it’s changing the culture, hiring the right coaches. I can’t think of a more extravagant reclamation project than the one you took on in November 1991. Green Bay, the prior 24 seasons, made the playoffs twice. Their record was 146-201-9. They went through five coaches. Free agency’s looming. There was a lot of real danger: Are the Green Bay Packers going to become obsolete? Why take this job? And what's going through your mind, when you walk into those offices and you walk into Lambeau Field and you’re wondering, “How in the hell am I going to resurrect this once-great franchise?”

Wolf: Well, the thing was, I wanted an opportunity to prove that I could do it. I didn’t do a very good job in Tampa and I thought it was all gone. However, two things happened. One, Dick Steinberg was hired by the Jets and George Young was hired by the Giants and they’re my vintage, my age, my age bracket. So I think, “Geez, I might have an opportunity here.” And lo and behold, here came the opportunity from the Green Bay Packers and I was not going to turn that job down. To be quite frank, at that particular time, I really wasn’t sure where Green Bay was in association with the weather. And I knew about the history and the thing that kind of sold me was the job that Curly Lambeau did in building that dynamic football team that he did in a place like Green Bay. And you wonder, “Well, how did he do that? How was he able to do that?” And you talk about a legendary figure. There is a legendary figure. So anyway, I knew what it would take to turn a franchise around. You have to have a quarterback. My time in Tampa, we could never get a quarterback and there wasn’t one in the draft. We tried to make some trades, they didn’t work out. And eventually I got canned, but that’s a different story. I’m not interested in that. But you ask about that.

Lo and behold, my first day on the job from a game standpoint happened to be in Atlanta and obviously we’re playing the Falcons and I had worked with (scout) Kenny Herock for a long time and he was running the Falcons. He told me that if I wanted to see Brett Favre throw, I’d have to go down the field now because when his team comes out, they won’t let him throw. He won’t even participate. So I knew right away, what? I got a chance to get the guy that I thought was the best player in the 1991 draft, and I knew what it was going to cost. I knew it was going to cost the No. 1, there’s no question about that. Talked to Bob Harlan, who was sitting beside me, told him “We’ve got a chance to get the quarterback that’s going to turn this thing around.” And he choked on his hot dog. He said, “I tell you what, we have an executive committee meeting on Tuesday. Bring it up to the board.” Which I did. And to make a long story short, we worked on it every day and eventually we were able to pull it off and get him. Guess what happened? He’s the guy that turned this franchise completely around. A remarkable player. He was even better than I thought he was. The records he established probably are going to be tough to be broken. An incredible performer. Then we lucked out. We were able to get Mike Holmgren as a head football coach and the dominoes sort falling in place.

So you’re the director of player personnel with the New York Jets that prior ‘91 draft and you hold the 34th overall pick and you’re going to take Brett Favre with that pick, correct? You had conviction then.

Wolf: Yeah, no question. We were going to take Brett Favre. But they had used (their first-round pick) on Rob Moore in the supplemental draft. So Steinberg was working the phones trying to get up to get Favre. He thought he had a deal. And when the Cardinals came up, I think the Cardinals might have been in front, might have been (32nd). They said, “No, the guy that we want is there.” So fortunately for me, the Jets lost Brett Favre. (Note: The Falcons took Favre at No. 33, the Jets selected QB Browning Nagle at No. 34.)

It's amazing when you look at where the Jets have been since at the quarterback position — to this day. But what were those moments that gave you conviction on Brett Favre? Is there a game at Southern Miss? Is there a practice? I think there was a scrimmage that you saw even in Portland at one point. How did you get to that point where you’re OK as the GM of the Packers staking your career on that trade — trading a first-round pick for Brett Favre. A complete unknown.

Wolf: I had an opportunity to go to Southern Miss and watch him play and he had that serious automobile accident and lost 30 inches of his (intestines). I'm not sure what he lost. And he wasn’t really — at the time I was at Southern Mississippi — he wasn’t the Brett Favre that usually played there. So, as I was leaving a guy named Thamas Coleman, one of the great names in college football, said I need to look at him from the previous year. Which I did. And, wow, I was amazed at how lightning, how good he was. And then I went to bowl games, the East/West game. He was a dominant player in that game. He played the whole game at quarterback and then the Falcons were scrimmaging the Seattle Seahawks in Portland, Oregon. And I flew out there for that. With him, the field kind of dominated in his favor. Whenever I saw him, he controlled the game. And I honestly believe that the field did dominate because he dominated the game. And that was a selling point.

We’ve had Brett on this podcast and he relived that first year in Atlanta. You know Brett, he’s going to be honest in terms of the bar fights and the drinking and not taking football seriously. I think at one point he even said, I’m paraphrasing, “I don’t know what in the hell Ron saw me. I don’t know why they mortgaged the team, the future on me with what I did that first year.” Did any of that off the field stuff — I’m sure you’re placing calls and you’re learning as much as you can about him and what’s going on in Atlanta. He’s the third stringer. He’s a side-show clown in pregame — Jerry Glanville is making fun of him. Did any of that concern you when you are putting your career on the line for this guy?

Wolf: Not at all. Not at all. I didn’t allow that to affect my feeling of him because of my prior experience. All the years, you don’t have a quarterback in this game, you’re in a lot of trouble. Sundays aren’t fun, Mondays aren’t fun. Thursdays aren’t fun. And then as you get a quarterback, you can actually breathe. And lo and behold, that happened less than a minute to go against Cincinnati in 1992.

And you would’ve traded the fifth overall pick even if you had to. You traded the 17th for Favre. But that’s how much you wanted him and the conviction you really had. You’re getting him through hell or high water.

Wolf: That's right, that’s right. I wanted that quarterback, I wanted that player. And the great thing is he never let me down.

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Even beyond the quarterback position, when you take that GM job — and you’re looking around at how things are run — what did you see that really needed to get cleaned up? I’d imagine it’s right down to how a player’s checking out socks from the equipment manager. Drew Bledsoe told me that once in New England that it was pretty bad when he first got there in the early 90s. He needed to check out socks. Green Bay is not exactly then what it is today.

Wolf: No, but what a marvelous place that is — Green Bay, Wisconsin. It is a hallowed place. There’s no question about that. You walk into Lambeau Field and you see those magical names that surround that stadium and you realize the impact this little city had on the game. So this was the thing that we had to play upon. We had to bring that back. And one way we did it was by having an honorary captaincy program and we brought those names in to talk to our players —  Willie Davis, Willie Wood, Ray Nitschke, Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, so on and so forth. And it worked. It worked to say, “My goodness, they had success here and we can have success, too.” Because the interesting thing was, I want to say 90 percent of our guys that went to work every day — who drove down Lombardi Avenue to go to work — had no idea who Lombardi was, and that’s a difference in football than say a sport like Major League Baseball. But we played on that. It worked. Played on the tradition and told them, “All we want you to do is play football. We don’t want you to do anything but play football and be responsible.”

And by and large, we were able to clean out the locker room, get rid of the guys that really couldn’t play. And there were guys that didn’t want to play. Liked the money. Eat, ride and warm-up guys, which I happened to be one of ‘em myself back in the day. But anyway, we got rid of them, built a team and had success. The interesting thing to me that we were able to do is the whole time we were there, we never had a losing season. We won more games in Lambeau Field, 25 consecutive games in Lambeau Field. At that time, that was No. 2 in the league. Another thing is I had to learn what it took to play in October and November and December in Green Bay, Wisconsin. A little different than Oakland, Calif., and Los Angeles, Calif.

You just touched on such an unbelievable advantage that the Green Bay Packers have always had, too. You can look at free agency coming in and be all gloom and doom, right? Who in the hell wants to live in Siberia? The Athletic just had a poll on the worst places to visit and the players are voting Green Bay, but there’s such an inherent advantage to running a football team in Green Bay where you don’t have an owner who’s going to step in and tell you what to do, who to pick, how to run your business. And it’s all football. You mentioned that to me when we talked the summer a certain quarterback was holding this team hostage for a few months and you said, “I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to be in Green Bay?” It’s all football. No distractions. If that’s the primary objective, where else would you want to play? And kind of thinking through that lens, I’d imagine as a GM would really help you rebuild this thing.

Wolf: It did. It certainly did. I mean obviously once you have Favre, we were blessed. We had one of the most remarkable players that we inherited when I got there — in the history of the Packers. That was Sterling Sharpe. He was amazing. I’m sure that when teams got ready to play the Packers, they would say, “All we have to do is take away Sharpe and we’ll beat them.” You know what? They could never take him away. What a fierce competitor. What a tremendous receiver. There’s a guy that belongs in Canton, Ohio, who unfortunately due to injuries may never get there. But for three years he was as good as it gets at what he did and how he did it. He was just amazing. When I had an opportunity in ‘86 to interview for the job with the Packers, at that time, the two best players were James Lofton and Ken Ruettgers. So here I come in ‘91 now and the two best players are Ken Ruettgers, and this time, Sterling Sharpe. No one else jumped in there. And that helped.

When you are able to run a team the way you want to run a team without that interference, that’s just got to help so much, too. I would imagine that's not the case everywhere.

Wolf: I tell you what, that was a big help and hitting Favre really helped. I had to go to Harlan to get approval to do stuff and then once we got Favre and we started winning, I would just go to him and say, “This is what we’re going to do.” And he went with it. Reggie White came in and that made a huge difference from the national media, but not from that players underground because guys like Sean Jones came in and Santana Dotson came in. We were able to trade for Eugene Robinson. Players of that ilk made the announcement that this is a good place to play.

How were you able to sign Reggie White? Your version of events, how did that happen?

Wolf: Well, I’ll tell you how it happened. Mike Reinfeldt, who was the chief, cook and bottle washer, I don’t know what his title was. The Chief Financial Officer. He did a hell of job recruiting. And the bottom line is, you know what, we paid him more money than anybody else. That’s how we got him. Today, that’s chump change. That was a lot of money.

Was it hard to ask for money in those early days with the Packers?

Wolf: No, not really. The interesting thing with the Packers was everything was funneled back into the Packers and we just had to up the revenue, so to speak. When I got there, they only charged three bucks for parking. Well, we needed money. People around Lambeau Field were charging $20. So why can’t we charge $20? Little things like that to generate more capital to work. But the good thing was that the underground network — the players — kind of liked what we were doing there, and it helps have a good team.

That’s a really good point. So players are talking and word’s getting out on what’s happening in Green Bay and it’s going to be a smoother conversation when you’re negotiating.

Wolf: Yeah, exactly. We brought food in, we brought barbers in, we did everything we could to make it a compatible place to play for everybody. And again, all we asked them to do was what? Play football. Be accountable. And if they weren’t, they were gone.

So you’re hands-on with that day-to-day, nitty-gritty kind of stuff to make it player-friendly? What little things are you doing to make it a place where players would want to go to?

Wolf: Some people said, “You need to do this.” I would listen to friends of mine tell me what I needed to do to — to sell. And this was part of it. An after-game party. We always had an after-game party, win or lose. Family would come and they would eat, drink, whatever. Make it player compatible. That’s all we had. It is a great place to live. Your kids can leave their bicycles out all night and guess what? They’re there the next morning. The only thing you have to be content with is the weather.

You said you didn’t really know what you were getting into — in terms of that weather — and that’s going to play into the type of player you’re drafting and signing. What were those traits that you needed to see in a player? … The cold is different in Northeast Wisconsin.

Wolf: You need bigger people. You need the Big Ten football player from the University of Wisconsin or Michigan. And I didn’t realize that initially. Once I did, we had to get bigger people because the climate necessitated that. Now here’s the deal. LeRoy Butler does the Lambeau Leap and we’re playing the Oakland Raiders and it was Christmas Eve and I’ll tell you what, it was cold. It was really cold. And the Raiders come out — the big, tough Raiders — are coming out and they’re coming out in t-shirts. Well now they can’t go back. They don’t realize how cold it is, and they have to stay out there in t-shirts. Our guys were wearing parkas and practicing in the pregame warmups and all that. The game was over before it began. Al Davis told me that his face didn’t thaw out until the third quarter because he was always hanging out, he always stood on the field and watched practices and all that.

You’ve got to find a mentally tough player. How do you find a player who can excel and do their job in negative-20 wind chill?

Wolf: Again, you’ve got to go with size, you’ve got to go with where they played. That has so much to do with it. Now, it is interesting that our two best defensive players played at Florida state and Tennessee, and that is not exactly cold. As Edgar Bennett once said, who played fullback for us for a long time, “It’s a job. It’s what we like to do. That’s why we like it here.”

We skipped past the hiring of Mike Holmgren. You wanted Bill Parcells initially, right? He had a heart attack and the timing wasn’t right for Parcells. And then you hire Mike Holmgren and it’s a perfect fit with Brett Favre. What was that whole process like when you’re trying to find a coach to turn this thing around?

Wolf: Bill had to have open-heart surgery, so that eliminated him. And Mike Holmgren was the girl with a curl. There were so many teams courting him and I never really thought we had a real opportunity to get him. He had done such a marvelous job with the 49ers and, lo and behold, he came up and was sold about the opportunities in Green Bay. He knew about the history of the Packers, which played an important role and he did an amazing job of hiring a staff, one of whom is still a head coach with probably the best team in the NFL. And he did a great job. But we were very fortunate to be able to get him. He was all about football.

What was that relationship like with Mike Holmgren as you’re building a Super Bowl champion?

Wolf: I think overall we had a really good relationship. We only had one disagreement with the players the whole time we were there, which is unique in itself. But with him, I think what he brought was no matter who you have, you have to get ready to play the game. In other words, he was saying, “I don’t have wide receivers. We’ve got to come up with an offense that runs the ball. Or if I don’t have a runner, we’ve got to find something.” He was never, “Oh, poor me, this guy’s hurt. That guy’s hurt.” People get hurt in this game. It’s a tough physical game. Those remarkable physical specimens sometimes do get hurt. I remember talking with Jim Plunkett asking him, when he was with the Raiders, asking him: “Doesn’t it hurt you to get hit like that?” He said, “Hell yes.” But that to me was the thing that Holmgren had was his ability to find the guys and the right set of coaches to get the best out of the players.

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I would imagine there’s some hard conversations when Brett’s going through hard times. Throwing a lot of picks. You’ve got Mark Brunell behind him and there are some coaches on staff that want to just give up on this Brett Favre experiment and Mike Holmgren sticks with him. What were those conversations like as the GM when this is going down and this franchise can go hard one direction or the other at that most important position?

Wolf: This might shock you, but I never knew about those conversations because they knew if they came to me who I was going with. I’ll never forget, he’s a free agent and we are having a practice out in Arizona. Brunell and Detmer are out there. They’re the quarterbacks. Well, I get on the phone with Reinfeldt and I said, “I don’t care. You sign that guy. You sign Brett Favre. Get him out here. There’s a noticeable difference. And Brunell went on and became a really good quarterback with Jacksonville, but he wasn’t Brett Favre.

That’s part of “The Packer Way,” your book detailing everything we’re talking about here. Draft a quarterback as much as you can. It’s too important. Even as much as you love Brett Favre and he’s winning MVPs and he is the franchise, you knew “we’ve got to keep adding to this room.” And it surprises me when teams don’t do that. But what went into that philosophy? Where was that born for you?

Wolf: It started with the Raiders. When I first started with the Raiders, we had two guys who were “good” quarterbacks, but they weren’t difference-makers and you need a difference-maker at that position. And we were able in ‘67 to trade for Daryle Lamonica from the place where you are now sitting (Buffalo) and you know something? In the history — in the history of pro football — there are two quarterbacks that have a better than .800 winning percentage as starters. One is Otto Graham and the other one is Daryle Lamonica. Think about that.

I wouldn’t have guessed that in a million tries.

Wolf: You could ask that and no one’s ever going to get that because you’re going to talk Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, so on. Once we got Lamonica, it became easy. Then we were able to draft a guy like Ken Stabler and so on and so forth. So that’s where that came from, to have that protection. And with the Raiders, we always had three pretty good ones.

Brett breaks out in ’94. MVP in ’95. You win it in ’96. You get back in ‘97. But as the franchise is ascending and the glory days are back and everything is changing right there in little old Green Bay, Wisconsin, what were those seminal moments? Were there moments if it’s a game, a conversation, a practice where it kind of hits you? Like, “We’re getting there. We’re doing something special here.”

Wolf: I think that the fact of that 25 wins in Lambeau Field. Because everybody wanted to play the Packers. Because they were going to get… “Oh, we’re playing the Packers. Shoot, just put a W there and we’ll worry about something else.” That wasn’t the case anymore and I was really proud of that. My biggest moment, I was in it 37 years actively, and the greatest moment I ever had was when we won that title in Lambeau Field against Carolina because everybody said that would never happen. And it happened. What a tremendous moment that was for me personally.

I can remember you on that stage and that energy flowing through you. You were pretty jacked winning that NFC Championship Game.

Wolf: No question.

You take over a team. Obviously you need a quarterback, No. 1. Have conviction, hit the bullseye. But try to identify the advantages that you have as a GM — play off the history. Bring in these legends to talk to the team and incorporate them as much as possible. Play off the weather — make homefield an advantage. You don’t have an owner? That’s a great thing. Football people are making football decisions. It seems like you just had that intelligence to realize, “OK, there’s some disadvantages, but who cares? We’re going to do everything we can with what we’ve got.” And it was a perfect storm.

Wolf: I remember sitting with Mike Holmgren and saying, “Hey Mike, there’s two people that can really mess this up and we’re looking at each other. Let’s not do that.” But for the most part, it kind of worked for us. Now he got a little antsy there in the end when contemporaries were getting head coach and general manager jobs. And I could understand that he wanted one of those and I’d always told him that would not hold him back. If he had that opportunity, we would let him go, which we did.

If Mike sticks around, probably another Super Bowl or two?

Wolf: Maybe, maybe. We got jobbed in San Francisco when Rice fumbled that ball and that brought about instant replay. That didn’t do us any good, but it brought about instant replay, which I think improved the game. And as Jerry Rice said, he never did fumble the ball. Well, if you go on stats, he’s right. He never did fumble the ball.

Which game sticks with you more — San Diego, Broncos, Super Bowl 32 or that Wild Card at Candlestick?  

Wolf: Oh, the Broncos game. I still to this day, after being away 24 years, I still think about that every once in a while.

What replays through your mind?

Wolf: Well, what replayed through my mind was I had made two mistakes in personnel. Wayne Simmons was gone and Sean Jones was gone. And if either one of those were there, they wouldn’t have beaten us, I don’t believe. Talking about locker room leadership.

How much does that really mean? What kind of value did they really bring to that locker room that was missed?

Wolf: Because of their stature, particularly Jones. Because of his stature, he was very well-respected and he was an older veteran that had been through it all and he commanded what he needed to command out of those guys. He was really a good player for us. And he was also a pain in the neck for the coaches. And the coaches got tired of it. If I had to do it over again, I would have never let him go.

I feel like if you played Denver 10 times, you probably win eight of them. The talent you still had on that roster.

Wolf: Well, a lot of guys were sitting on their helmets at the end of the game too. That didn’t help either.

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But the year before you win a Super Bowl. What do you think doesn’t get talked enough about in terms of what made that ‘96 Packers team special? I’m just thinking of that trade for Andre Rison and tackle Bruce Wilkerson. All kinds of little moves you made along the way.

Wolf: Yeah, I think what doesn’t get talked about was how good the defense was. The defense set records that are better than that vaunted ‘85 Bears defense. Fritz Shurmur did an amazing job — he and his staff — of pretty much controlling everything. That’s probably it. We went to Dallas and flubbed up and fortunately I think Jacksonville put Rison on waivers and we had just lost Brooks for the year. It didn’t look good. So we spent $100 and got Andre Rison and that turned things around a little bit.

Robert Brooks had the torn ACL. Antonio Freeman had a broken forearm. I think you’re down to Terry Mickens and Don Beebe at one point. And you claim Andre Rison. Now, talk about a checkered past. You could have looked at that as a GM and said, “Why would I bring in this personality with all of these red flags to a championship contender?” What helped you kind of look past what could go wrong to envision everything that could go right?

Wolf: That’s what we kind of looked at. The positive. The glass was half full, not half empty. We didn’t have anywhere else to turn. That’s part of it. You’re up to your neck in alligators so to speak. So, what a $100 investment? We see what we got, and it turned around, turned us around. Actually, Doug Evans turned this around in St. Louis, but having Rison in the long run for the last eight didn’t hurt.

You lose at Dallas, at Kansas City, it’s going rough in St. Louis and Doug Evans, the cornerback, had a pick-six that game, right?

Wolf: Yes he did.

That’s got to be such a key, too, as a GM. You’ve got to constantly be evaluating and tweaking and challenging yourself to get better. It is just a day-to-day challenge that you have as a GM. How much are you leaning into your pro scouts in terms of this kind of stuff in the middle of the season, but also your college scouts. You’ve got Ted Thompson on your staff. He eventually becomes the GM and wins the Super Bowl himself. How important is it to be collaborative and really bring your scouts in to come to these decisions?

Wolf: I think it’s very important because I had a heck of a staff. My nine years up there, six guys became general managers in the NFL. Two of ‘em won Super Bowls and one built a Super Bowl team and he doesn’t get credit for that to this day, but he did it.

John Dorsey?

Wolf: Yeah, John Dorsey. Yeah. So anyway, I was fortunate to have guys like that. To them, the game was important. Look at the job Schneider’s doing now. I mean, it’s incredible what he’s able been able to accomplish up there in Seattle. So it helps to have good people around you. And I was blessed in that regard. I worked them hard and they responded.

Can you take us back in that time machine. What are those conversations like with a young John Dorsey, John Schneider, Ted Thompson? Any memories come to mind?

Wolf: It’s been a long time. But Reggie McKenzie, Ted Thompson, the guys that were in the pro end, I drilled them every time I came back. I would go on the road — usually Tuesday through Friday — and come in Saturday, catch up and then Sunday meet with them before the game and we’d go over, or Monday, we’d go over all the rosters in the NFL and I was particularly interested in the Central division. I wanted to know how they rated those players and where our guys fit. Five left tackles, who is the best left tackle for example? Or the defensive right end? Where do our guys fit? How good is this guy? And those guys had to respond and, by and large, they did a pretty good job of doing that. Keeping me informed of who the players were, who the upcoming guys were, who the guys that were losing it a little bit. It worked for us.

I had never known how close Ted Thompson was with Brett Favre, too. They obviously had their differences the summer of ’08. Brett said back in the 90s, they’d get beers. For somebody who didn’t say much at all at the podium as the general manager — it was always trade secrets with Ted, he’s not exactly Ron Wolf up there — I had heard that his personality and his sense of humor was very underrated. What was Ted like as a person day to day?

Wolf: Day to day, very serious. He is very bright to begin with and I trusted his judgment on a lot of things because he played. And he was one of those guys, on a 53-man roster, he was 53. He was always on the verge of being cut. So he understood the game, understood the intricacies of the game, understood what he had to do to stay alive, to stay active. And same thing. He worked hard at what he did and look how successful he was as the GM with the Packers. Look at the guys he picked, starting with Aaron Rodgers, who will be a Hall of Fame player. Clay Matthews, who probably will be on the fringe, if not should be a Hall of Fame player. And you go on and on. I mean, he picked some really great players. Plus, what did he do? Signs Charles Woodson, Hall of Famer. So he had an eye for talent. No question about that.

At the end of your career, you take Donald Driver at 213, Alcorn State. You leaned into Alonzo Highsmith to identify this talent way down south. But what do you remember about that decision to draft Donald Driver in the seventh?

Wolf: We were in the process of trying to line up guys to sign as free agents. And so we’re calling Driver. I think we were calling his agent, and the agent said, “Well, he’s got an offer of such and such and so, so.” I said, “Cancel that. We’re going to draft him.” We got him from a pick by the Bears by the way. We traded Glyn Milburn for a seventh. Got that seventh and it turned out to be Donald Driver. You talk about being fortunate. We were very fortunate to get a player of that caliber there. The luck of the draw as they say.

And then also to trade Fred Vinson for Ahman Green, the Packers’ all-time leading rusher. You think of all the running backs who’ve come through Green Bay: Jim Taylor, Paul Hornung, John Brockington, and Ahman Green has more yards than any of them. … What went into that trade negotiation? And again, there’s a red flag, right? The fumbling issues could have scared you off.

Wolf: What happened was we were fortunate because Holmgren was in Seattle and Holmgren took a couple of guys with him and maybe he took the whole staff. Well, no, he didn’t. And I knew that when that fumbling issue came up, I knew who was in Holmgren’s ear. I had been at the University of Nebraska and Green ran a time that was just unreal. So I went to Mike Sherman and I said, “Mike, let me ask you a question. What’s the deal with this Ahman Green? Is he a bad kid?” (He said) “No, no, none this stuff.” So with that, Fred Vinson, who had more ability than most people, but didn’t ever display it, we were able to trade him up there. Because they needed a corner for Green and it really worked out well. I think those are probably the two best trades in the history of the Packers: Brett Favre and Ahman Green. Getting Willie Davis wasn’t bad by that fellow Lombardi. Getting Henry Jordan wasn’t bad either. But to have Favre and Green, just think about that. Like you said, the all-time leading rusher in the history of the Green Bay Packers is Ahman Green, a third-round draft choice from the University of Nebraska.

And that ‘03 team can probably have that same “What if” conversation as the ‘97 and ‘98 teams. A fourth and 26 away, in my opinion, from winning it all. That group was loaded.

Wolf: Yeah, they were. They were. It’s a shame that happened. Happened in a bad place, too.

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You’re in the Hall of Fame. Is there anything you would’ve done different?

Wolf: Oh yeah. There’s a lot of things. We don’t have enough time here for all the things that I wish I had done differently, but I’m just thankful for the opportunity that was presented for me up there in Green Bay, Wisconsin. As I said before, it’s the jewel in the crown of the National Football League. You can’t be at a better place in regards to professional football than Green Bay, Wisconsin. And to be able to be a member of that group, that society if you will, of Green Bay Packer alumni, it’s a remarkable feeling. The opportunity we had to change the thought process. Look at that, how long that’s gone on. Since 1992, the Packers have been really something. I mean that’s 30 some years. And to have a hand in that: myself, Ted Thompson, Brian Gutekunst, these are guys that I hired and they’re still going strong. It’s wonderful.

When you’re Super Bowl champs and those glory days are back, how would you describe that feeling? What was it really like when your goal to tap into Lombardi and Nitschke and Willie Davis and all of those legendary names — in ’91, it’s just an idea, a hope to somehow make this place magical again — so when it was, how would you even describe the look and the feel?

Wolf: I think what happened was, and you can see it today, I think the fans are really spoiled up there now. There’s a whole generation that doesn’t know what losing’s like and it’s so much easier now. You’re going to be critical. But for me personally, it’s a wonderful feeling to be able to, if you will, resurrect a marvelous franchise, bring it back to the glory that is so rightfully deserves. And it has just a wonderful tradition, a great history: Lambeau, Lombardi. A great history. And it’s a nice place to finally hang your hat.

I believe in ’08, the Detroit Lions came calling, too. So you had that opportunity years later and decided no.

Wolf: I’m not sure if there was really an opportunity there, but I was in the process of moving back to Green Bay when that call came and we just bought a house in Green Bay and I wasn’t going to go anywhere else. I mean, I had it.

I hope you’re able to enjoy some relaxation down there. Taking in a little baseball, right? You’re probably paying as much attention to baseball as football these days.

Wolf: I do, I do. I pay a lot of attention to baseball. I realize how tough it is. I didn’t know anything about baseball, but like everybody else, I thought I knew. I knew absolutely nothing. Let me say this, none of whatever in my career with the Packers would’ve been possible without the support of my wife Edie. And she raised our kids and she let me live my dream, so to speak, and I’m obviously deeply indebted to her for that.

How difficult is it to raise a family and have a life outside of football? When you’re resurrecting a franchise, you’re making these decisions that are going to dictate everybody’s livelihoods?

Wolf: You have to have proper support people, and I have the best you could have in my wife. So that's how you do it. Easy to say, huh?

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