In an effort to settle down some of the chaos swirling in my head because of the brain-lurching reality that is Thursday Night Football, I turned to a source of comfort: spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets are neat and tidy, built specifically to organize and sort data in useful ways. And into my spreadsheets today I have input a series of names and numbers: the Packers’ core players on offense and defense and their ages over the next few seasons.

This doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know, but I think it’s still an interesting exercise. Look at how young the Packers’ offensive core players are going to be all the way out until 2030! To say this is a young group now feels like an incredible undersell. They’re going to be young for half a decade yet!

On defense…well, it’s going to be a familiar story. It seems like the Packers’ defense has been under construction since 2011 or so, and even though a few of the core pieces are going to be under contract for a while, you can see how the defense is going to remain a work in progress for a while yet. Their best three defenders are already 26, Devonte Wyatt is already 25, and Quay Walker and Lukas Van Ness do not make for a future all by themselves. Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but the Packers are going to need an injection of young talent on defense in the very near future.

Of course, all of this is functionally imaginary. There’s no world where the Packers will keep all their young offensive players together indefinitely. Even among the promising players, someone will fall off. Someone will get injured. Someone might decide football is no longer for him and move to the desert to lead some kind of cult. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but it never hurts to look ahead a bit.

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