Johnson was selected by Pittsburgh in the third round of the 2025 NFL Draft out of Iowa
Page A6From§Eachthe midnight edition — 31 August 2026
Packers gain 'Josh Jacobs insurance,' Jacobs then lands on exempt list after strangulation charges.
As it ran on the front
This reporter has covered a great many trades in his day, and few have carried the ironic elegance of the Green Bay Packers' acquisition of running back Kaleb Johnson, purchased — by the estimation of this network's own analysts — as 'Josh Jacobs insurance.' It is a term of art in professional football, insurance, denoting the depth chart's version of a spare tire, and this reporter recalls with pride that the Packers last required such depth in 1996, the year Brett Favre led Green Bay to victory in Super Bowl XXXIII.
“Sugar, Super Bowl XXXIII was January of 1999, and Brett Favre's Packers won Super Bowl XXXI, over the Patriots, in January of 1997. They lost XXXII to Denver the year after that. Gus is off by two Roman numerals and a parade.” — Trudy
…(cont) As this reporter was saying, the insurance policy paid out with what this network's actuaries would call unusual speed. Within days, the very Josh Jacobs the Packers had insured against was placed on the Commissioner's Exempt List, a designation reserved for players facing legal proceedings of consequence — in this instance, two misdemeanor charges arising from a strangulation arrest. This reporter has seen many roster moves in forty years of broadcasting, and he says without hesitation that this ranks among the most prophetic front-office decisions since the introduction of the salary cap, which this network is proud to note was established by Commissioner Pete Rozelle in 1962.
“The salary cap didn't arrive till 1994, under Paul Tagliabue, hon, and Rozelle was three commissioners gone by then. But Gus has the sequence right where it counts: the Packers bought the insurance, the claim came due, and the exempt list followed, in that order, same week.” — Trudy
What this reporter finds instructive is not the timing, which he concedes is a matter for the record books, but the plain arithmetic of it: a team pays a transaction fee for a depth-chart running back, and within the same news cycle, the player he was insuring against is drawing a league-imposed suspension pending two misdemeanor counts. The house that pays out for insurance ordinarily prices the risk in advance. This reporter leaves it to the actuaries — and to Trudy — to say whether the Packers' front office simply beat Las Vegas to the number, or whether somebody in that building already knew.
“They call it 'insurance,' like the guy's a spare tire — turns out the tire blows the same week they buy the spare, and now the front office is explaining strangulation charges to the league office. That's not insurance, that's foresight.”
“The exempt list is standard procedure, it's a neutral roster mechanism, it doesn't say guilt, it says pending, and teams add depth pieces every year for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with — okay, this one's a little on the nose.”
The receipts
Green Bay's backfield is facing uncertainty entering Week 1, with Jacobs prohibited from practicing or attending games
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.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.