The Packers' History of Drafting Punters Is Worse Than You Think

The Packers have a pretty dismal history of drafting punters.

“Of the 12 punting specialists the Packers have drafted,” wrote Pete Dougherty last week for PackersNews.com, “seven of them never punted for the team and the other two didn’t come close to panning out.”

That’s a pretty interesting nugget in and of itself, especially following the selection of JK Scott in the fifth round of this year’s draft. But Dougherty actually undersells the Packers’ terrible history with punters. It’s even worse than you’ve been told.

That the post-Lombardi, pre-Wolf era of Packers history is not a revelation to anyone, but the Packers’ punter selection in the later years of that stretch are emblematic of how dismal it truly got.

Between 1985 and 1991, the Packers drafted a whopping five punters, and not only did none of them ever punt for the Packers, none of them played a single snap in the NFL. Ever.

To be fair, two of those picks (Jim Meyer in 1985 and Kirk Maggio in 1990) were twelfth round picks, clocking in at selections 323 and 325, respectively. At that point in the draft, teams might actually not have ever told guys they’d been drafted.

But still, to pick five guys in a row at a single position who never played a single down in the NFL has to be some kind of record. No matter what you think about the Packers taking a punter in this year’s draft, it’s going to be hard for things to work out worse than that.