David Grant

In the spring of 1993, the Packers made a move to bolster their defensive line.

No, it’s not the move you’re thinking of, though Reggie White certainly did bolster their defensive line.

The Packers also signed 28-year-old David Grant that spring, bringing the former Cincinnati Bengals draft pick to the Packers after an ill-fated stint with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Let’s put the conclusion of the story right up front: there’s nothing noteworthy about Grant’s time with the Packers. He didn’t even record a measurable statistic in the seven games he played in 1993. No sacks. No tackles. Nothing. But that’s not particularly noteworthy; plenty of players on the Packers have come and gone without recording many, or even any, significant stats.

Grant is noteworthy as evidence of one thing: Ron Wolf’s process as the Packers’ general manager.

Wolf was a tinkerer. He liked to fiddle with the Packers’ roster, cycling through as many players as he could to try to find any kind of edge. He was known to bring in a crew of tryout players on a near weekly basis, and sometimes would make changes to the bottom end of the roster just to keep players from getting comfortable. He liked to maintain an edge, and he figured competition was one way to do it, even if that competition involved players from off the roster. You’re not just competing with the guys in Green Bay to get on the field, was the subtle message. You’ve got to hold off any player out there looking for a job.

Grant may be evidence of that kind of process. When he signed with the Packers, Grant was the fourth of four nose tackles on the roster. Without going too deep into the mechanics of roster construction, teams simply don’t need that many noses. It’s a specialty position, and most observers figured the Packers could get by with two, or maybe even one.

It figured to be a tough competition. All four noses — Grant, John Jurkovic, Bill Maas, and Alfred Oglesby — had been starters at points in their NFL careers. If Wolf was looking to bring out the best in the crew he had, he’d found a way to do it.

Grant, of course, was hardly the only noteworthy free agent in Packers camp. Whatever contributions he made early on were overshadowed by the presence of the living legend, Reggie White, being in Green Bay. But he wasn’t the only star in camp with the Packers, though nobody knew it at the time. Grant was also spending time in defensive meetings with future Hollywood star Terry Crews, who had a short, undistinguished NFL career before turning to acting, which seems to have worked out for him. Regrettably, Crews never appeared in a regular season game for the Packers.

Grant had a rough camp. In late July, he tore cartilage in his knee badly enough that it required surgery that put him on the shelf for quite some time. Nevertheless, he ended up making the active roster, somewhat to the confusion of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, which described him as “perhaps the least recognized player on the roster” in a brief piece.

Once the regular season started, Grant’s role slowly grew. He was inactive for the Packers’ first two games, presumably still recovering from knee surgery, but appeared in every game from Weeks 4 through 11.

He was contributing enough that a reporter sought him out for a quote ahead of the Packers’ Week 10 game against the Kansas City Chiefs. Joe Montana was ailing, so 35-year-old journeyman Dave Krieg was set to start.

“He’s no Joe Montana, as far as winning, but he’s still a good quarterback,” Grant said. And he was right. Krieg went 17 of 30 for 170 yards against the Packers, and though he was sacked four times, his effort was enough to get the Chiefs a win. He at least avoided the mistakes his Packers’ counterpart fell into; Brett Favre threw three interceptions in the loss.

But though the Packers had lost, Grant was gaining steam. Shortly after the Kansas City game, the Press-Gazette ran a position-by-position breakdown of the whole Packers roster. Grant received conspicuous praise for a player who had yet to record a tackle. “Slowed by training-camp knee surgery, he’s beginning to show some push,” the assessment went. “A good veteran backup.”

And then he disappeared.

Grant played in the Packers’ Week 11 victory over the New Orleans Saints, and then never appeared in a game again. He was active but did not play in four of the Packers’ final seven games, with three inactive designations sandwiched in between.

What happened? Nobody knows. He just seems to have abruptly fallen out of favor. Even the local newspaper was befuddled by his sudden disappearance down the stretch, writing about it in their season-ending roster recap.

“Where did Grant go, anyway?” the piece read. “At one time, the former Cincinnati starter beat out Matt Brock as one of the down lineman in the ‘nickel’ package, but inconsistent play dropped him out of sight after that. He was slowed by training-camp knee surgery and never really regained his stride.”

This is some questionable reporting considering the paper’s previous reporting on Grant. The last thing they’d said about him was about how he’d been improving, and that report ran the day the Packers took on the Saints. If inconsistent play was going to drop him out of the lineup, he didn’t have much time to do it.

The reality is that Grant was a low roster guy to begin with, and those players were always vulnerable in the Ron Wolf era. He was always looking for an edge, and the simplest explanation is that he found it elsewhere.

That’s how things ended for Grant, both in Green Bay and in the NFL. HIs contract expired at the end of the season, and he never signed with another NFL team. It was Wolf’s process that brought him to Green Bay and, ultimately, what sent him out of Green Bay as well.