9 Thoughts About David Bakhtiari

The Packers’ primetime loss to the Detroit Lions has no shortage of storylines. You can run with any one of them in just about any direction you choose. Is Jordan Love good or bad? How much of this loss do we put on Matt LaFleur? Joe Barry? There’s no storyline there, Joe Barry is just the question.

But outside the game, the Packers’ longest-running B-plot finally came to a head. Early Thursday evening, word came down that the Packers had placed David Bakhtiari on injured reserve. Initially it seemed like a procedural move to clear a roster spot while Bakhtiari worked to clear up his ongoing knee issues before rejoining the team later in the season, but further reporting made it clear that he’s done for the season.

To say there are a lot of feelings tied up in this story is to categorically undersell what’s gone on with Bakhtiari since his initial knee injury all the way back in 2020. Even with respect to Aaron Rodgers’ perpetual airing of grievances and his eventual exit from the Packers, I don’t think anything has frustrated Packers fans more than the week-in, week-out dance concerning Bakhtiari’s knee.

I can’t begin to sum up every facet of this story, but I also can’t stop thinking about it. So in lieu of trying to encapsulate everything, here is an assortment of thoughts about Bakhtiari, the Packers, and what this all means.

1 - I don’t like getting old. It makes me sad. I can relate to David Bakhtiari in that my knees also often hurt now for reasons that I don’t really understand. But there are blessings that come with age, too, and some of those blessings appear in unusual forms as a sports fan. I think it’s really cool to be able to look back on a player’s entire career and think about what he’s accomplished. For all the frustration of the past few seasons, Bakhtiari has been a magnificent player in Green Bay. He’s a remarkable success story, and it’s pleasant, in a way, to look back on what now seems to be a closed canon in Green Bay. 

2 - There’s a sad symmetry to Bakhtiari’s story, too. He got his chance as a rookie because of Bryan Bulaga’s torn ACL, and now it’s a knee injury that will end things for him. The circle of NFL life remains unchanged. The old give way to the young, and the opportunities for the youngsters will often be created by the same things that created the opportunities for their predecessors.

3 - That’s the flipside of some of the blessings of age: being an older fan now drives home the impermanence of everything. Even the greats will fade away, and in most cases the game will be taken from them before they’re ready to go. That’s clearly the case with Bakhtiari. If not for his injury, we’d probably be talking about the Packers doing some different kind of work on his contract this offseason to continue to retain him well into his 30s. He turns 32 tomorrow. He’s played just 12 games in his age 30, 31, and 32 seasons combined.

4 - There’s no way to know this for sure, but if not for Bakhtiari’s injury, I feel like the Packers appear in, if not win, at least one more Super Bowl. Among other things, the Packers’ losses to the Buccaneers and 49ers in 2020 and 2021 were shaped significantly by Bakhtiari’s absence. A little less pressure off the edge changes things in ways we can’t really understand. If nothing else, we wouldn’t have had Dennis Kelly matching up against Nick Bosa. 

5 - You can’t really talk about Bakhtiari without talking about his contract, but truly I have a hard time getting worked up about it. Extending Bakhtiari was the right thing to do. He was an elite player at a premium position whose injury history at the time portended a long and productive career ahead of him. The results have been catastrophic, but I don’t see how that could have been avoided. It’s possible to make no wrong moves and still lose.

6 - That’s not to say there haven’t been wrong moves. The Packers have consistently moved money around in Bakhtiari’s contract, seemingly under the impression that he was always just about ready to come back and put his injury issues behind him. At some point, that’s merely hope-based wastefulness rather than any kind of evidence-based decision-making. The initial contract wasn’t a mistake, but there have been mistakes since then.

7 - Even allowing for the idea that the Packers have made mistakes, they do have evidence to point to regarding Bakhtiari’s recovery. There were some hiccups at the start of last season, but over the last two months of 2022, Bakhtiari looked like he was fully back. Other than the games he missed due to a ruptured appendix, Bakhtiari played every meaningful snap down the stretch, only sitting out a handful of reps during the Packers’ obliteration of the Vikings. Why wouldn’t the Packers have assumed that he was fixed at that point?

8 - The mystery around Bakhtiari’s knee and the way in which he, his coaches, and the Packers as an organization have handled it are a big part of this story and I don’t know what we do with that. Bakhtiari’s personality has played a role in this saga; he’s so California cool to a fault that what passes for strident passion from him still comes across as significantly less intense than someone like, I don’t know, J.J. Watt. It’s not hard to imagine a different public reception for Bakhtiari’s process here if he was posting every moment of his rehab to Instagram and talking about the grind and his desire to be out there and all the typical tryhard phrases. The messaging has been similarly lukewarm from the Packers. They seem to be trying to walk a fine line between not talking about it at all, giving the bare minimum information, and outright lying. I don’t know how you fix some of that if you genuinely don’t know the answers, it just feels like it could be better.

9 - The knowledge that my best players could just become completely ruined at any given moment would give me ulcers as an NFL GM. Even understanding that it’s part of the game, it would still give me anxiety every waking moment of the day. The difference between “Brian Gutekunst, Super Bowl-winning general manager” and “Brian Gutekunst, the guy whose only legacy in Green Bay is making Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams mad at him” could really come down to a single play from a single practice before a game that didn’t really matter anyway.