Johnson was selected by Pittsburgh in the third round of the 2025 NFL Draft out of Iowa
Page A7From§Eachthe midnight edition — 31 August 2026
Packers add Josh Jacobs insurance days before Josh Jacobs lands on the exempt list.
As it ran on the front
This reporter has covered professional football long enough to recognize a franchise hedging its bets when he sees one, and the Green Bay Packers, ladies and gentlemen, hedged. In a trade grade published even as the ink dried, the Packers were said to have acquired running back Kaleb Johnson as, in the parlance of the modern press box, 'insurance' against the health of incumbent ball-carrier Josh Jacobs — a maneuver this reporter recalls being pioneered by the 1968 Baltimore Colts, when insurance backfields first entered the vernacular of professional football.
“Gus, the 1968 Colts didn't invent 'insurance backs' — nobody did, sugar, it's just a phrase, and you're inventing league history that doesn't exist. What's real is Kaleb Johnson landed in Green Bay, and days later the man he was insuring against was the one who needed insuring.” — Trudy
…(cont) Indeed. For no sooner had the ink on that trade grade cooled than the commissioner's office placed Josh Jacobs — the very back Green Bay had just fortified against — upon the Exempt List, following the filing of two misdemeanor charges this reporter is reliably informed arose from a strangulation arrest, a sequence of events this reporter is prepared to call the fastest actuarial vindication in the sixty-two-year history of the National Football League.
“The league is sixty-two years old if you start counting from the 1920 APFA, Gus, not wherever you're counting from, but leave the math — the point stands without it. Green Bay bought insurance on a Tuesday. It paid out by the weekend. That's not commentary on Josh Jacobs the man; that's the transaction ledger, and the ledger doesn't lie even when this reporter's arithmetic does.” — Trudy
What remains, for this reporter, is the tidy symmetry of the thing: a front office that manages risk for a living, managing it correctly, entirely by accident, in real time, on national television. Green Bay did not know what was coming. Green Bay simply always assumes something is coming. This week, something did.
“And that, sugar, is the whole story — not a scandal invented for a headline, just a roster move that turned out to be exactly as necessary as the front office feared, for reasons the front office could not have named out loud.” — Trudy
“A front office that manages risk for a living managed it right without knowing why, and that tells you everything about how these organizations actually operate — they hedge first and explain later, same as every institution that's ever handed you a bill you didn't see coming.”
The receipts
Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs was reportedly set to hit the Commissioner's Exempt List ahead of the start of the 2026 NFL season.
Green Bay's backfield is facing uncertainty entering Week 1, with Jacobs prohibited from practicing or attending games
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.