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Packers use doughnuts, ‘Man Hands’ to help them in training camp

GREEN BAY, Wis. — In the middle of the first training camp practice of the season, the Green Bay Packers rolled out doughnuts for their players. It was such a hit then, they did it again on Day 2.

Then once practice ended, a few players engaged in a hot session of “Man Hands.”

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Cue up the Eddie Lacy and “Seinfeld” jokes now if you will.

Yes, some folks have had fun with Lacy’s weight (with doughnut punch lines) in the past, but we’re not talking about edible doughnuts here. These are tackling aids — giant padded rings — to help the players with their fundamentals that they hope will carry over into the season.

Several Packers players say there’s no official name for them. So call them doughnuts if you want. Call them green-and-yellow onion rings — my personal favorite. But the Packers feel like these odd-looking things have helped.

Green Bay Packers linebacker Lerentee McCray practices tackling ... on a doughnut (AP)
Green Bay Packers linebacker Lerentee McCray practices tackling … on a doughnut (AP)

“I think that might be the best [simulation] of a tackle you can get as far as going against a bag,” safety Ha Ha Clinton-Dix said. “You have to run through the doughnut, get your arms through the hole and wrap up.”

Clinton-Dix said he wasn’t sure what to initially think about them when the Packers rolled the doughnuts out during OTAs, and he was more than willing to let fellow starting safety Morgan Burnett be the guinea pig.

“Morgan’s the leader, so I let him go first and let him demonstrate,” Clinton-Dix said. “If he messed up, I’d know not to do it that way.”

Burnett laughed at his unofficial title for new practice drills.

“They always use me as the crash test dummy,” Burnett said. “Any new drill, I go first and make sure it’s safe. If I get up, then they know it’s safe.”

Burnett issues a warning: It’s not as easy as it looks — and yet it’s easy to look bad doing it.

“You have to get low,” he said. “Otherwise you could hurt yourself or … embarrass yourself. It’s easy to look back. It’s the same way with tackling in a game.”

Not everyone is a fan, though.

“I really don’t like them,” Packers outside linebacker Jayrone Elliott told Shutdown Corner with a smile. “It’s kind of like tackling a smaller version of Marshawn Lynch. It’s low to the ground and very difficult.

“I am not good at it. I can do regular tackles in games. I am just trying to figure out how realistic [the drill] is.”

As for “Man Hands,” it’s a drill the Packers receivers did after the first camp practice on Tuesday. The players are asked to stand inches away from a JUGS machine, spitting out footballs at a high rate of speed. They have to catch passes from three angles — from the left, from the right and standing beneath with their hands overhead.

Here’s the Packers’ version of the drill:

Not too shabby — only two dropped passes in the portion we witnessed.

Now here’s the famous Seinfeld skit, just for fun:

You needed that, you really did. (Sadly, Packers receivers coach Luke Getsy said that the name of the drill has no connection to Seinfeld, which is a colossal disappointment, but at least he knew the episode when asked.)

Getsy arrived to the Packers in 2014 and brought the drill with him from Western Michigan. It was there Getsy learned it from Broncos head coach P.J. Fleck, who thought it improved concentration and hand strength. Getsy loved it and now has the Packers using it periodically.

“You want to catch it with your fingers, not your palms,” Getsy said. “This helps with that.”

Getsy said the Packers won’t do it every day but that they’ll rotate it in regularly to keep players on their toes — or on their fingers, as it were.

Green Bay Packers receiver Davante Adams works on his
Green Bay Packers receiver Davante Adams works on his “Man Hands.” (AP)

Still, the receivers we spoke to feel like it helps them hang onto passes in practice and, they hope, in games.

“Man Hands! Love it,” Packers receiver Randall Cobb said. “You have to be ready for it when it hits. It’s a different feeling. It’s a little surprising when you first try it. Different than being [several yards back]. Obviously, it’s not coming out full speed. But it’s more about the feel of the ball and having strong hands that close up.”

Rookie receiver Trevor Davis — a fifth-round pick who has been a huge standout the first two days of camp with several highlight reel grabs — said he never had seen anything like “Man Hands” before. But consider him a convert.

“I like it,” Davis said. “You need strong hands, and it’s really an area of my game I’ve wanted to focus on. It’s helped. I like new drills that test me in different ways.”

It’s a bit of a dirty secret around these parts, but for all the talk about Jordy Nelson’s absence, a patchy secondary and a banged-up offensive line, these areas — tackling and dropped passes — were a huge problem for the team in 2015.

Now the Packers have two creative but unusual methods to help curb those areas.

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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at edholm@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!