4 Packers who won’t be back after huge Xavier McKinney, Josh Jacobs deals

After Jordan Love arrived sooner than expected in his first season as the Green Bay Packers starting quarterback in 2023, the next steps were always going to be fascinating. This was already one of the youngest rosters in the NFL, but Brian Gutekunst and the Packers wasted no time adding more elite young talent in free agency.

Early after the legal tampering period began on Monday, the Packers inked two major deals, signing safety Xavier McKinney to a four-year, $68 million contract and running back Josh Jacobs to a four-year, $48 million pact, though the latter could ostensibly be as short as a one-year deal thanks to the structure of the contract.

Both of these moves are big-time upgrades for the Packers moving forward. The downside, however, is that we're already seeing some familiar faces gone from Green Bay. Aaron Jones was released after Jacobs was locked in, David Bakhtiari is on his way out as expected, and De'Vondre Campbell is also expected to be cut.

While these moves don't preclude Green Bay from more moves -- they've already re-signed players like Keisean Nixon and Tyler Davis. But it does mean that there are several other Packers who fans surely know (and maybe love, though maybe not) who won't be back in Green Bay thereafter for one reason or another.

4. Josiah Deguara, TE

When tight end Josiah Deguara was coming into the NFL Draft out of Cincinnati in 2020, there were many fans of the player and the potential he could grow into with NFL coaching. And at least at various points in Deguara's early career with the Packers, who ultimately selected him in the third round with the 94th overall pick, it seemed like Green Bay was invested in seeing that development.

Over his second and third seasons in the NFL and across 33 games played, Deguara had some moments as he caught 38 of 48 targets for 359 yards and two touchdowns. More tellingly, 13 of his 38 receptions went for first downs. But it also became clear that the tight end just simply wasn't becoming the player that they'd hoped he would as a late-Day 2 project.

Subsequently, the Packers used a pair of Day 2 picks to upgrade the tight end room in the 2023 draft when they selected Luke Musgrave and Tucker Kraft, both of whom played bigger roles with the Green Bay offense as rookies than Deguara did in year four.

On top of that, we've also already seen this franchise re-sign tight end Tyler Davis, a better blocker than Deguara, to the veteran minimum. There isn't a reasonable measure by which they would create more of a logjam in the tight end room by re-signing Deguara to probably slightly more than the minimum, so it's a near formality that they simply let him walk without giving it a second thought.