Packers poach veteran guard Laken Tomlinson off Cowboys' practice squad
Green Bay didn't sign a starter. It signed a signal.
ESPN reported that the Packers are signing veteran guard Laken Tomlinson off the Dallas Cowboys' practice squad, and ProFootballTalk had the same, with Ian Rapoport and Mike Garafolo credited. Nothing is official until the transaction is filed, so treat the terms as reported and the mechanism as certain.
Here's the part the aggregation will skip. Under NFL rules, you can't poach a player off another team's practice squad and stash him on your own. Signing Tomlinson off Dallas's practice squad puts him on Green Bay's active roster. That's a 53-man spot spent in late September, which is a team saying something about what it has on the interior of its offensive line.
The easy read is that this is a body, a name for the depth chart. Maybe. But practice squad raids aren't random. They happen when a team has evaluated its own room and didn't like the answer, and when the player being taken is viewed as more than a stash by the team losing him. Tomlinson is a veteran guard, per the reporting, which is the profile you add when you want someone who won't need a month of teaching.
Dallas's side is the more interesting one. The Cowboys had a veteran interior lineman in their building, on their practice squad, and lost him to an NFC team for nothing. That's the rule working as designed. It's also a reminder that a practice squad is a rental, not a vault. If Tomlinson ends up playing meaningful snaps in Green Bay while Dallas shuffles its own interior, that's a roster decision worth remembering.
I'd push back on calling this a minor move. It's minor in cost and loud in implication. My verdict: Tomlinson is on Green Bay's 53 because the Packers think he can play, not because they needed a warm body, and he'll be in a game-day uniform sooner than anyone outside Wisconsin expects.
