AJ Hawk and the Green Bay Packers: The Career Nobody Can Quite Agree On
AJ Hawk retired holding the Green Bay Packers’ all-time tackle record – 1,118 stops from 2006 to 2014, more than any linebacker in franchise history since the team started keeping consistent records in 1975. He won a Super Bowl. He made one Pro Bowl. He got paid $33.75 million on a contract extension that made a lot of people very angry. Whether that adds up to a career well spent or a massive missed opportunity depends heavily on what you were expecting him to be in the first place.
The Draft That Started the Argument
Ted Thompson made the pick in April 2006. Fifth overall. Ohio State linebacker AJ Hawk, over Vernon Davis, the tight end out of Maryland who’d just run a 4.38 at 254 pounds and done 33 bench press reps at the Combine. Davis was something the NFL hadn’t quite seen – a receiving tight end with defensive end athleticism. The draft class was loaded at tight end position awareness and Thompson went linebacker instead.
Was it wrong? This is where it gets genuinely complicated. Davis went on to have a 13-year career, including some excellent seasons in San Francisco. But the Packers found capable tight ends regardless – Jermichael Finley caught between 55 and 61 passes in his best seasons. The position was manageable. The inside linebacker spot was not, and Hawk filled it reliably for nine years. The argument for Davis is cleaner in hindsight than it should be.
Hawk signed a six-year, $37.5 million contract out of the draft with $14.76 million guaranteed. Coming off a senior year at Ohio State where he’d earned first-team All-Big Ten honors and won Fiesta Bowl MVP, the expectation was a three-down linebacker who could disrupt opposing backfields. That version of Hawk never really showed up.
Nine Seasons in Green Bay – What He Actually Did
The first year was promising enough. He finished with 121 combined tackles, led the team, came third in NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year voting. The sack numbers – 3.5 – suggested he could at least create some pressure. Then 2007 came and those numbers softened. His tackle totals stayed respectable but the splash plays, the tackles for loss, the forced turnovers – they stayed largely absent.
From 2007 through 2009, Hawk was the Packers’ most reliable linebacker in the sense that he was always on the field. 16 games in 2007, 13 in 2008 (he missed three with injury), 16 again in 2009. The consistency was real. The impact plays weren’t. PFF graded him low annually, and while those grades aren’t gospel, they weren’t wrong about what he was: a sound, positionally responsible linebacker with limited range and no elite trait.
Then 2010 happened. He recorded 134 tackles, intercepted three passes (tying for the most among all NFL linebackers that season), and the Packers finished second in the league in points allowed at 15.0 per game. He got the Pro Bowl nod as an alternate. The defense was legitimately good that year – not because of Hawk alone, but he was part of a unit that was working. They beat Pittsburgh 31-25 in Super Bowl XLV. Hawk’s five tackles in that game don’t tell the story but they don’t embarrass him either.
The extension arrived in 2011: five years, $33.75 million. This is where reasonable people start to disagree in unreasonable ways. Clay Matthews was making less. Matthews, playing the same general position group, was generating sacks at a rate Hawk could never approach. The disparity was real and the reaction was justified. But context matters: the Packers had just won the Super Bowl, Hawk had just had his best season, and the front office needed a starting inside linebacker it could count on. They got that, at a price they probably regretted within two years.
His 2011 and 2012 were fine. Nothing more. 84 tackles in 2011, 142 in 2012. He took a pay cut in 2013 – shaved roughly $7.25 million off the back end of the deal – and did it without complaint. “I think it’s more of an ego thing than anything that guys can’t get over,” he told reporters at the time. He stayed. He recorded 134 tackles and 5 sacks in 2013, his best sack season by far, including a one-handed interception off Ben Roethlisberger in a Week 16 comeback win that was probably the best single play of his career.
By 2014 the writing was on the wall. Defensive coordinator Dom Capers began pulling him from nickel and dime packages, limiting him to base 3-4 looks. Aaron Rodgers told his radio show that Hawk had been playing hurt with “a body that hasn’t been responding.” Hawk denied it but the playing time didn’t lie. He’d played 70-snap games earlier in his career and Capers was protecting him from his own durability. Green Bay released him in February 2015 after he had ankle bone spur surgery. Nine seasons, 142 of 144 possible regular season games, franchise tackle record.
The Contract Problem Was Real, but So Was the Production
The honest version of this debate is messier than fans made it at the time. Hawk was overpaid on the extension – that’s just accurate. A five-year deal worth $33.75 million for a player who had one Pro Bowl season and moderate pass-rush ability was not defensible as value. He recorded 20 sacks over 11 NFL seasons. For context, Clay Matthews had 13.5 in 2010 alone.
But Hawk wasn’t asked to be Matthews. He wasn’t even consistently asked to rush the passer. He was the middle of the defense – the guy plugging gaps, making run fits, keeping the alignment clean so others could make the flashy plays. In that role, his tackle numbers are staggering. Five seasons leading the team in tackles. Led all Green Bay rookies since Rich Wingo’s 166 in 1979 when he posted 155 stops in 2006. He surpassed John Anderson’s franchise record of 1,020 tackles (set over 11 seasons from 1978 to 1989) in the final game of the 2013 regular season.
The players around him understood what he was providing. Rodgers: “He was a great leader by example. Just a guy who, I think, embodied what it means to be a Packer.” Mike McCarthy called him “the same guy every day” – which in NFL coaching terms is one of the higher compliments available. The indictment of Hawk as a player mostly came from people who wanted a different kind of player at that spot, which is a fair preference but a separate question from whether he did his specific job adequately.
What’s harder to reconcile: the Packers never found a clearly superior inside linebacker during his nine years. If he was as limited as his critics argued, the team had nearly a decade to upgrade him. They didn’t. That’s either a front office failure or evidence that the need wasn’t as acute as the criticism suggested. Probably both.
After Green Bay: Cincinnati, One Game in Atlanta, Then Done
He signed a two-year deal with the Bengals in March 2015. One season there, 24 tackles, a single sack. The Falcons called midseason in 2016 with an opportunity – he appeared in one game and Atlanta released him. He announced his retirement in January 2017, then worked with the Packers organization to make it official as a Green Bay player. The ceremony was brief and sincere. Thompson’s statement: “He is a good man. He was a terrific teammate and a true professional during his career, and we were lucky to have him.”
That framing, “good man” before “great player,” is telling. Nobody inside the building was arguing he belonged in Canton. What they were saying is that the nine years were genuinely appreciated.
The Pat McAfee Show and What Came After
He’d been planning the transition while still playing. The HawkCast podcast started before the retirement was final. He did work for Sirius XM and called college games on Fox with Pat McAfee – their first appearance together in the booth came during a Texas Tech-Baylor game in late 2018, before McAfee’s broadcasting career properly launched. When McAfee started building out his daily show, Hawk was a regular fixture. By the time ESPN acquired the program in 2023, Hawk was co-hosting alongside McAfee for the 12-3 PM ET slot Monday through Friday.
The persona he brings to the show – relaxed, cigar in hand, self-deprecating about his playing career, genuinely knowledgeable about the game – plays well in that format. He and McAfee had overlapping NFL timelines (McAfee played for the Colts from 2009 to 2016) and a shared sensibility about how to talk about football without taking it too seriously. Hawk’s comfort on camera surprised some fans who remembered him as a quiet, workmanlike presence in Green Bay. He’s more natural in that setting than his playing reputation would suggest.
He and his wife Laura also run the Hawk Family Fund, which focuses on pediatric radiation oncology research. That came out of personal experience with childhood cancer in their extended circle. It’s the kind of post-career work that rarely gets covered but says something about what someone does with the platform they built.
How the Record Books Actually Remember Him
1,118 career tackles as a Packer. First in franchise history since 1975. He led Green Bay in tackles five times, tied with Nick Barnett for the most such seasons in team history. Appeared in 142 of 144 possible regular-season games over nine years – 98.6% availability. One Super Bowl ring. One Pro Bowl selection as an alternate. Zero All-Pro votes.
That’s the complete ledger. There’s no hidden superstar in there that the system failed to recognize. He was what he was: durable, consistent, positionally sound, below replacement-level in coverage by modern metrics, above replacement-level in presence and leadership by the people who played with him. The contract extension was bad roster management. The career itself was a reasonable version of what a fifth overall pick can be when he’s never quite the player the draft position implied he would become.
One detail that doesn’t fit neatly into any narrative: the Packers benched him as a healthy scratch for the 2010 season opener against Philadelphia. During that same season he’d go on to earn his only Pro Bowl nod and win the Super Bowl. The Bills tried to trade for him that fall – they were offering Marshawn Lynch. The deal never happened, and Lynch went to Seattle instead, where he became one of the more dominant running backs of the next decade. Hawk stayed in Green Bay, started the remaining 15 games, and got his ring. Some things work out for reasons that have nothing to do with the decision-making involved.
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