Pickett in, Jackson out as run stopper

Usually averse to spending big money on other teams’ free agents in his 14 months as the Green Bay Packers' general manager, Ted Thompson made his biggest such move on Wednesday, landing defensive tackle Ryan Pickett.

The Packers, Buffalo Bills and St. Louis Rams all were trying to sign Pickett as the market for defensive tackles started to thin out.

The Packers looked like the longest shot of all after Pickett left Green Bay without a deal on Monday, then spent an extra day visiting Buffalo.

Pickett was interested in the Bills because his former defensive line coach in St. Louis, Bill Kollar, is with Buffalo. Pickett also told the Bills he has family in the Rochester, N.Y., area.
Pickett also had a good offer from the Rams, his former team, but Thompson made a strong enough pitch to lure him to the Packers.




Pickett didn’t sign the deal on Wednesday because he was traveling from Buffalo to his home in St. Louis.
Terms of the contract were unavailable. The Rams were offering a five-year, $16 million deal that included a signing bonus of $5.5 million, and it’s believed Buffalo’s offer was slightly better than that. The Packers almost certainly offered Pickett a deal in that range.

The addition of the 6-foot-2, 330-pound Pickett means Grady Jackson’s 2½-year tenure as the Packers’ run stopper in the middle of the defensive line is over.

Jackson’s agent, Angelo Wright, is shopping him to teams in need of a run stopper.
The Packers wanted Pickett, 26, to replace Jackson, 33, because he’s much younger, is more of an every-down player and isn’t as great an injury risk.

Pickett, the 29th overall pick in the 2001 draft, started for the Rams for the past four seasons and is coming off his best year. Last season, he led the Rams’ defensive linemen with 81 tackles. He also had 2 ½ sacks.

Until agreeing to the deal with Pickett, Thompson’s biggest signing of another team’s free agent came earlier this week, when he paid former Seattle safety Marquand Manuel a $2 million signing bonus as part of a five-year deal worth $10 million.

Thompson’s biggest signing of any kind came last week, when he retained defensive end Aaron Kampman just before the start of free agency. That move required a huge first-year payment of about $12 million in bonuses and base salary and likely is a more lucrative contract than Pickett’s.

Kampman received an $8 million signing bonus, a $3 million roster bonus, a base salary of $900,000 this year and a workout bonus of $105,720. It’s a four-year, $21 million deal, with base salaries of $1.9 million in 2007, $2.9 million in 2008 and $3.9 million in 2009, plus workout bonuses of $100,000 in each of those seasons.