The Packers' first game under Bart Starr

I haven't updated in a while, but I am still hard at work on my book, Packers History in 100 Plays. Here's an excerpt from the mid-1970s, when the Packers played their first game under new head coach Bart Starr.

It didn’t take long for the Packers to move on from Dan Devine.

Devine announced his resignation on December 16, 1974, and eight days later, in a Christmas Eve press conference, the Packers announced Bart Starr as their new head coach and general manager. It was a mistake.

Not only that, it was a rushed mistake. The day after Devine resigned, the Green Bay Press-Gazette pointed to two possible candidates to replace him: Bart Starr and Dave Hanner, another Lombardi-era player who’d who’d already been a long-time defensive assistant after a long playing career in Green Bay. He’d been drafted in 1952, played 13 seasons with the Packers, then immediately transitioned into a coaching role, serving first as a defensive line coach and then as defensive coordinator for the duration of Devine’s tenure.

For whatever reason, in the week it took the Packers’ executive committee to finalize things with Starr, they never appear to have seriously considered any other candidates.

Already on December 18, Packers president Dominic Olejniczak publicly denied the team had already settled on Starr. But after a meeting that afternoon, Olejniczak said the executive committee wanted to move fast — but not too fast.

“Naturally, the sooner we can make a selection — with screening and everything else — it would be advantageous,” he said. “On the other hand, to speed it along without doing a thorough job — we don’t want to do that, either.”

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