The 90 to 1 Green Bay Packers roster countdown: No. 31 – Josh Jones

Mike Pettine likes using a safety at linebacker. That should be Jones' role again this season.

The Green Bay Packers, and their 90 players on the roster, are in the midst of their first training camp under coach Matt LaFleur. In an annual tradition from my 11 years at Packer Report, I rank the players in order of importance from No. 90 to No. 1. This isn’t just a listing of the team’s best players. Our rankings take into account talent, importance of the position, depth at the position, salary and draft history. More than the ranking, we hope you learn something about each player. (Note: The start of this series can be found with my former employer.)

No. 31: S Josh Jones ($1,154,567 cap)

Oddly, Jones ranks so highly in this series because of a position he doesn’t want to play.

With Mike Pettine as defensive coordinator in 2018, Jones played 501 defensive snaps; according to Pro Football Focus, 266 of those came in the box. With Dom Capers as defensive coordinator in 2017, Jones played 730 snaps; 354 of those came in the box. Added together, 50.4 percent of his defensive snaps in his two NFL seasons have come while aligned at linebacker.

At 220 pounds and with 4.41 speed in the 40, he’s a natural for that hybrid spot.

“I’m not a linebacker,” Jones said after skipping the voluntary OTAs but returning for minicamp. “Y’all can get that out of your head. You can stop writing about that. That’s not going to happen.”

Regardless of whether Jones wants to play linebacker, that again figures to be his primary niche on the team – should GM Brian Gutekunst elect to keep him on the roster.

“I think Josh has had a really good beginning to camp. He’s shown up and made some plays,” Gutekunst said during the first week of camp. “Obviously, the physical gifts are all there and he’s getting a lot of opportunities and I think there are some really positive signs that he can really help our football team. We’ve got a long way to go and a lot of competition in that back end right now but it’s been really positive to see him out there doing what he’s doing.”

With Gutekunst signing veteran Adrian Amos in free agency and moving up in the first round to select Darnell Savage, the door appears shut on Jones being a starter. That leaves the hybrid safety/linebacker position, a role that is growing in importance as defensive coordinators try to find answers for the abundance of spread-the-field offenses.

Just look at the snap counts from last season. Pettine had his safeties on the field for 2,671 snaps compared to 1,471 snaps for his inside linebackers. The disparity isn’t solely because Pettine played a safety at inside linebacker but it does account for a big percentage of those snaps. It’s a trend that doesn’t figure to change.

“It depends on who you’re playing, what they’re doing,” Pettine said. “If you look at New England’s success last year, I think the league had really started to trend toward more of the spread offenses, and it was a lot more three wide receivers. They started to kind of push back the other way, and it was a lot of two-back runs, where you have to have the ability defensively to defend all of it. So, ultimately, it’s to defend the pass. If you can get the best of both worlds and have your second ‘backer be a safety or have some safety in his background, I think that’s ideal. But there’s still going to be times in this league where you’re going to have to line up and defense the iso, defend the two-back power, where you’re going to have to have some guys who are more actual inside linebackers.”