Brats & Beer

Murphy’s Law?

Both the Journal Sentinel and the Press-Gazette are reporting today some interesting developments in the Packers search for a new team president. Both papers say that the search committee is zeroing in on Northwestern University athletic director Mark Murphy, with the Green Bay paper going so far as to say that contract negotiations have started even though the full board has yet to vote on the issue.

The odd thing about this news is that Murphy has no NFL administration experience, which was the one qualification the board and Bob Harlan earlier said they were looking for in a candidate. To his credit, Murphy, a former player for the Redskins, was an assistant director of the NFL Players Association, so he does have some working knowledge of the CBA, but that was more than 20 years ago. You’d hardly consider him a league insider at this point.

The other question mark with Murphy is he has no ties to Green Bay or Wisconsin. As DrBear at Packerama points out, Harlan was still considered an outsider during the stadium renovation talks even though he’d been with the team for 20 years, how will the board and the community react to this choice? We’ll have to see how this plays out over the next few days.

In the meantime, of course, the important thing is the Packers keep winning. It would be great — for everyone — to send Bob Harlan out with a second championship under his watch, and that chase starts in earnest tomorrow night in Dallas.