Ted Thompson has never been the revealing type.

The Packers’ highly regarded general manager, in his 12th year in Green Bay, has always kept a low public profile and a low opinion of the media. Reticent and seemingly indifferent, Thompson’s dealings with reporters are marked by playing coy, clinging to cliches and divulging virtually nothing of substance.

But considering he’s built a team that’s made the playoffs eight times, captured five division titles and won a Super Bowl in his tenure, the results speak for themselves – and also for Thompson. So keep doing your thing, TT. More power to you.

Indeed, the unforthcoming approach actually makes his infrequent media interactions all the more amusing, as long as you’re not really looking to learn anything about Packers personnel operations. Think Gregg Popovich, with less disdain and more shoulder shrugging.

So when Thompson ("I have sizzle") stepped to the podium for his annual pre-draft press conference Wednesday, we were eager to tune in and hear how he’d sidestep questions and avoid giving real answers this time around.

All the usual Thompson tropes were there (best player available, draft and develop, we like our roster), along with his characteristic "aw shucks, I don’t know" facade that – one hopes, given he’s the top decision-maker for one of the most successful sports franchises in the world – belies authentic acumen and preparation.

When Aaron Rodgers speaks ambiguously, there’s almost always intent to communicate some implicit message that you can decode if you read between the lines. With Thompson, there’s never any such encryption; he just wants to say nothing and leave, as demonstrated three minutes into his session at Lambeau Field on Wednesday.

Still, he was asked nearly two dozen questions and spoke for more than 20 minutes, which, he must have said something noteworthy, right?

Simply because of his position, importance and rare access, anything Thompson utters is inherently – and ironically, given his non-intent – significant to Green Bay’s fans and press corps. So it’s pretty funny to try and derive anything out of it. ("For the 10th year in a row, he said the Packers will take the best player available! But what does that really mean?")

Before everyone gets mad, remember: Ted Thompson is a very good, accomplished general manager. He’s also massively and hilariously disinterested in his media obligations. This concerns the latter. 

Here are excerpts of Thompson’s pre-draft press conference, translated:

"The draft, as we can see today, is a very popular thing, and the public consumption of sports and certainly the NFL and anything that has to do with the NFL is very popular. But I always want to make sure everybody understands my appreciation for this organization. Mark Murphy, first of all, and our coaching staff led by Coach McCarthy, but everybody – and they do every year – works so hard to help us put it all together. Obviously the personnel people, the football operations people, all the coaching staff, our player personnel, our video people, our equipment, our medical people, our public relations, all those people are directly involved in the actual draft process, whether it be helping in terms of logistics or arranging for travel for guys that we bring in to visit. It’s just an enormous amount of work, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that and praise their efforts. Because it seems like most of the attention is directed towards me, and first of all I’m not very comfortable with that and second of all it’s not warranted because we have a whole team full of people that are kind of joining together to put this on."

Translation: I know I’m the top personnel decision-maker for one of the top teams in the top sports league in the world, and one of our marquee events is next week that garners enormous public attention and wherein, as the top personnel decision-maker I will make crucial decisions for my team, but there’s like 300 other people who work here, so can’t someone else talk to you guys about it? Where’s Cindy from the Pro Shop? People like her are the real heroes; go ask them about 40-yard dash times.

"I was thinking about this. When we played Washington in the playoffs, we were obviously the visiting team. We were staying downtown and I went out for a walk and it turned dark – it wasn’t late late, but it was 8:30 in January in Washington, D.C. – and I’m walking around, trying to dodge traffic, you know, I’m just a country bumpkin, thinking I’m gonna go for a long walk. I get out and there’s a grass area and there’s cars going this way and cars going that way, and I’m in this grass area, and I look up and right there is the Capitol Building and it’s under construction and it’s got all the scaffolding all the way around the building. And I just stopped there in the middle of it – and I was safe because the cars were on the road and I was in the middle of it – but it was like, I didn’t go out for a particular purpose, but when I got there I said, This is the reason I went for a walk. And hopefully we’ll go through this draft process, and I’ll get to a point and I’ll say this is the reason we did all the work on the draft."

Translation: I started this meandering story to try and run down the shot clock here and now I can’t remember if there’s a point to it. But yeah... Hopefully, we’ll get a point near the end of the draft, when I’m using one of the five seventh-round picks I traded back for to select that Fitchburg State tight end, where I can nod, look around and tell everyone, "This makes it all worthwhile."

"So having said that, we’ll take questions. ... No questions? Thank you (laughs)."

Translation: While you’re all still baffled and trying to make sense of that bizarre story about my walk around D.C., maybe I can make my escape.

"No, we don’t (do our own mock drafts). We tried to, but we’re so personal with it and so locked in to it individually that we make it up. And if it’s somebody we really like, we’ll go, ‘Oh yeah, we can get him here, that’s fine.’ So we fool ourselves and we try to stay away from that."

Translation: Mock drafts are for Mil Kiper and bloggers. We do real drafts. And what’s the point of trying to predict what teams will do before you? You just have to hope Justin Harrell falls to you at No. 16, and when he does, you take him.  

"It’s the draft room, we like to refer to it, as opposed to the (war room). There are gut-wrenching times when you’re so close to getting what you think is the perfect player for your team, and then that player might get picked right in front of you or something. But oftentimes when that happens, as it turns out in the long run, you were better off that happening in the first place. I do a lot of praying and sometimes the Good Lord, I think, looks down on us and helps us out."

Translation: While some football people make run-of-the-mill comparisons and references to war – "going to battle" and "being a warrior" and "coming out guns blazing" and such – we recognize the fact that football is just a game and respect that it’s not nearly as important as the sacrifices American soldiers make on the front lines. Having said that, God is a Packers fan and He does tell us when a run on defensive ends is coming.

"I think it’s a good roster, so I feel pretty good about it going in."

Translation: (This was literally Thompson’s response to "What do you think of your roster going into the draft?" He was then asked to elaborate.)

"We’ve got a number of players that we’re going to add to our roster. We’ll do that through some late free agency, we’ll do that through some drafting and do that, obviously, through some college free agent-type stuff. But there’s always opportunity as you go through the summer months."

Translation: Well, a roster can be built through a few different channels, including free agency, the draft and undrafted free agency. Also by trades. You were asking me to just list the general methods of player acquisition that everyone already knows, right?

"We’re no different than anyone else. We’re fans of college football, and if a guy is a really good player where everybody says, ‘Oh, look at this guy,’ we usually fight over saying whose guy it is: ‘It’s my guy,’ ‘No, it’s my guy, I had him first.’ So we work all that out."

Translation: We’re college-scouting hipsters. We fight over which of us knew before the mainstream what players were cool.

"We’ve been together (drafting) for a long time. I think that part’s starting to be OK, but you still want to have the passion and the energy to stand on the table and say, ‘This is what we need to do and this is the reason we need to do it.’"

Translation: Last year, Eliot Wolf had to ask me repeatedly to please get down off the table because it was an injury-insurance risk.

"We try to draft the best available player. I say this every year and everybody goes (grumbles). We think it’s important to stay focused and try to take the best player. I think that from a personal standpoint, just common sense, it makes sense to me that you would want to take the best player, because the situation about needs is normally a temporary one. What you think you might need is not necessarily what you’re really going to need next week, because things are going to change between now and next week. So as long as you’re taking really good players and taking the best players you can identity as being the best players available, then, in some respects, you’re able to stay a little bit in front of the curve. If you get my drift … if you understand what I’m saying."

Translation: You guys ask me this question 10 times every single year, and I’m never going to say something different. No matter how you try to frame the question or if you ask me in two follow-ups if there’s any wiggle room.

"I suppose there is. I would never tell you that there is. If you asked me, I would say no that’s not the way it was."

Translation: There is wiggle room. Drafting Derek Sherrod 32nd the year of Chad Clifton’s last season was drafting for need.

"We have a large draft room and we have several walls on it, and on each of those walls there’s name tags. And sometimes it’s name tags of our current players and sometimes it’s name tags of our current players and their contracts. There’s a wall for all kinds of things. If you can think of it, we have a wall for it in our draft room."

Translation: We’ve got a wall showing 40 times, a wall showing vertical leaps, a wall for our own players’ contract terms, a wall for favorite food, a wall for weirdest hairstyles, a wall for underwear type, a wall for worst first-date experiences, a wall for hopes and dreams, a wall for Trump-supporting prospects to build across the border, a wall for guys that look good in green. We’ve got lots of walls. Our draft room is a decagon.

"There’s a lot of information now. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s probably not so good. There’s all kinds of analytical stuff that you need to have someone paying attention to – maybe not necessarily me, but someone else paying attention to it."

Translation: It’s definitely not me. And what in the hell is DVOA?

"Like I said before when the question came up about it, there are places in our roster where we’re relatively thin, when looking at it from a 90-man roster standpoint. But we have quite a number of guys that were on the team before this spring and will be on the team going forward."

Translation: Mathematically, we will add players to our roster, but some guys – Aaron Rodgers, Clay Matthews? Heard of them? – who are currently on the team will still be on the team later.

"It’s more enjoyable when you pick 32nd because there’s nothing that can be done to you to make your smile go away. Seriously, we can’t lose sight of that. I mean, this is about winning. And if you can win, everything’s good, where you pick and that sort of thing is immaterial. But to answer your question, there are challenges of either. But in a perfect world, we’d pick 32nd, meaning we were world champions, and then in all the other rounds, we somehow had the first pick in every round. If we could do that, that’d be perfect."

Translation: You asked me, presumably hoping for something thoughtful and illuminating, about the challenges and enjoyments of picking near the top of the draft compared to the bottom and, as you know, the NFL Draft is determined simply by reverse finish from the prior season. Therefore, if I was picking 32nd it would mean we had won the Super Bowl, so that is the best. And if I could somehow, magically, also then have the first pick in each subsequent round? Oh man, that would be great. But ask me again, now that I have descended back down to earth, about the differences between drafting near the top and the bottom.

"I don’t know. I enjoy the challenge of either. And the challenge of the one is different than the challenge of the other. Obviously."

Translation: Different things are different. Obviously. We’re done here, right?