Green Bay entered the NFL’s cutdown day with work still left to do. The Green Bay Packers had 56 players on the roster and needed three more moves, whether by release or injured reserve placement, to get to 53 before Sunday’s 6:00 PM Eastern Time deadline.
That is why the Packers 53-man Roster search is peaking now. Teams had to trim from 90 players to 53, and Green Bay had a little less than 48 hours from the end of its final preseason game to finish the job. Brian Gutekunst had already made clear earlier this week that he was “not a fan of the shift” in the cutdown date, a reminder that the clock was tighter than usual.
The roster picture was further narrowed by the players still on active/PUP. Luke Musgrave, Matt Orzech, Micah Parsons and Jordon Riley were the four Packers on that list and eligible for reserve/PUP to open the season, which would keep them off the 53-man limit. Josh Jacobs also was placed on the commissioner-exempt list to start the 2026 regular season, taking another name out of the immediate equation.
Parsons is the name that keeps the deadline from feeling routine. He had generally been targeting Week 6 against the Dallas Cowboys for his return, but he was still on active/PUP, which meant the Packers had to decide whether he stayed on a reserve path to start the year or counted against the final cutdown if they chose another route. The league’s rules leave only so much room: only two players can be placed on injured reserve as designated to return before cutdown, and anything beyond that becomes season-ending.
That math is what made Green Bay’s final moves so important. If the Packers wanted to preserve players for a later return, reserve/PUP was the cleaner route because it does not count against the 53-man limit. But those players cannot be activated until after the team’s fourth regular season game, even though they can begin practicing after two games have passed. The waiver process then starts in earnest on Monday, and that is when the rest of the league gets its chance to sort through the names Green Bay let go.
So the question left by Sunday night is not whether the Packers had a roster problem. They did. It is which three moves Brian Gutekunst would use to solve it, and whether any of the four active/PUP players would be kept on reserve/PUP to start the season rather than forced into a harder decision before the deadline.
