The Packers’ cornerback battle has a wrinkle worth watching, but it still doesn’t look like a situation Green Bay should rush to solve with a trade.
Rookie Brandon Cisse has apparently put himself in position to claim one starting job, and Keisean Nixon is not guaranteed to hold the other. If Nixon ends up as the primary backup, that would give the Packers depth they can actually trust. It could also leave Nixon in an awkward spot if he’s hoping to land a new deal.
That’s where Bill Huber of Packers On SI sees a possible complication. In projecting Green Bay’s 53-man roster, he raised the idea that the Packers could move Nixon if he doesn’t win the job.
"Nixon probably is going to be a Week 1 starter. But that's not a lock.
And if he's not a starter, would either party be happy with Nixon in the locker room as a backup? Nixon, a veteran corner with a reasonable salary, could be in demand on the trade market," Huber writes.
It’s not hard to see why other teams would at least call. Nixon has starting experience, and his base salary of $4.3 million is manageable for clubs looking for help at cornerback.
Still, Green Bay would be wise not to treat a trade as the obvious next step. Moving Nixon would create a hole the Packers don’t currently need to open, especially with the cornerback group already thin enough that depth matters.
The room includes Nixon, St-Juste, Cisse, Carrington Valentine, and now Kamal Hadden, which makes the position look more like a competition than a clear weakness. But it also doesn’t give Green Bay so much surplus that Nixon suddenly becomes expendable.
Nixon could always ask for a move, though he hasn’t done that yet. And for now, he still looks like the favorite to start next to Cisse.
If that’s how it plays out, the best path for Nixon may be to back himself, play out the situation, and aim for free agency in 2027, when he can chase the contract he has been after.
For now, he remains a useful player, even if the results have been uneven at times. That’s not the profile of someone the Packers need to dump just because the starting job isn’t guaranteed.
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Packers Backfield Suddenly Has A Bigger Pierre Strong Jr. Question
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Brian Gutekunst said the Packers believe they can handle whatever comes next, and that is where MarShawn Lloyd and Pierre Strong Jr. become more than depth pieces. If Jacobs is unavailable, the workload has to go somewhere, and the attention on Strong has grown because Green Bay needs dependable answers behind its starter, not just bodies for practice snaps. [Read more 🡒]