Packer Central

Packers Sign Former Pro Bowl Linebacker Jaylon Smith

After recording 417 tackles the previous three seasons, Jaylon Smith was released by Dallas and has joined the Green Bay Packers.

Bill Huber

GREEN BAY, Wis. – The Green Bay Packers have signed Jaylon Smith, who went from a Pro Bowler to one of the highest-paid linebackers in the NFL to the No. 4 linebacker in Dallas in the span of just a couple years.

The signing was finalized on Thursday morning.

With elite athleticism and a penchant for making big plays, Smith was considered one of the top prospects in the 2016 draft until suffering a major knee injury in Notre Dame’s Fiesta Bowl game. After sitting out his rookie season and starting six games in 2017, Smith became a highly productive piece of the Cowboys’ defense with 121 tackles in 2018, 142 tackles in 2019 and 154 tackles in 2020. He started all 48 games in those three seasons with eight sacks, 17 tackles for losses, four forced fumbles and 18 passes defensed.

"He is a physical specimen, first of all," Packers coach Matt LaFleur, the quarterbacks coach at Notre Dame in 2015, said before Green Bay played at Dallas in 2019. "Even going back to when I first got back to Notre Dame, I was so impressed at just his size and ability to move. It’s been a pretty cool story having known Jaylon. I’ve always really liked him, first and foremost, as a person, and to see somebody battle through the adversity that he went through when there were a lot of people who told him he would never play (again).

"Obviously, he didn’t play that first year but that second year he was out there playing and he didn’t look like himself. But now when you cut on that tape, it looks like the Jaylon I remember. He is an elite player and a guy that we have to account for at all times because he’s not only good in the run game but he’s good in the pass game. He’s good as a blitzer. I think he’s a complete football player"

After three seasons of strong statistical performance, the Cowboys invested heavily at linebacker this offseason with the free-agent addition of Keanu Neal and the selection of Micah Parsons in the first round of the draft and Jabril Cox in the fourth round. In their 4-3 scheme, Parsons had a unit-high 195 snaps, followed by Smith with 148, Leighton Vander Esch with 135 and Neal with 101.

In four games this season, the 26-year-old Smith had 18 tackles.

With Green Bay, he’ll potentially join De’Vondre Campbell as the starting tandem at inside linebacker. Campbell, who was signed in June, has been one of the real standouts of the season. Campbell and Krys Barnes opened the season as the starting pairing; Barnes suffered a concussion in Week 3 at San Francisco and was inactive last week against Pittsburgh. Oren Burks had six tackles in 36 snaps against the Steelers.

“I like him as a person,” quarterback Aaron Rodgers said of Smith after Wednesday’s practice. “He’s a super-friendly, happy guy, even on the field. He’s a fierce competitor, but he always has a smile on his face. So, I appreciate that about him. I think anytime you add a veteran player to a team, there’s the possibility of a guy getting an opportunity who’s played football before at a high level, and sometimes it just takes an environment switch for some of those guys to play their best football.”

After the 2018 season, the Cowboys signed Smith to a five-year extension worth $64 million which included $35.5 million guaranteed. The deal tied him to Dallas through the 2024 season.

“You took a risk, a $4.5 million risk had I never been able to play again,” Smith said to Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones upon signing. “Me understanding that, it was my duty for them to get their return on their investment. They've been able to do that, and now I'm fortunate enough to really be a Cowboy for life, which is what I wanted.”

As it turns out, “for life” is fleeting. Viewed at the time as a sideline-to-sideline defender with the new-age skill-set to fit in today’s spread-the-field NFL, Smith earned Pro Bowl honors in 2019.

Now, he’s on his way to Green Bay with the hope that Joe Barry’s defensive system will be a better fit for his skill-set.

“Really, this wasn't an easy decision,” Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy said. “He's a good football player. He's played excellent football here for a long time, but we have a [defensive] system, I think it's clear now after four games how we're playing.”

The Cowboys owe Smith his $7.2 million base salary, according to ESPN.com’s Todd Archer. Whatever the Packers will pay him will be on top of that amount.

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Bill Huber
BILL HUBER

Bill Huber, who has covered the Green Bay Packers since 2008, is the publisher of Packers On SI, a Sports Illustrated channel. E-mail: packwriter2002@yahoo.com History: Huber took over Packer Central in August 2019. Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillHuberNFL Background: Huber graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he played on the football team, in 1995. He worked in newspapers in Reedsburg, Wisconsin Dells and Shawano before working at The Green Bay News-Chronicle and Green Bay Press-Gazette from 1998 through 2008. With The News-Chronicle, he won several awards for his commentaries and page design. In 2008, he took over as editor of Packer Report Magazine, which was founded by Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke, and PackerReport.com. In 2019, he took over the new Sports Illustrated site Packer Central, which he has grown into one of the largest sites in the Sports Illustrated Media Group.

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