National Football League

Green Bay Packers CB coach on unit: 'They don't like me right now'

Published Jun. 1, 2015 12:08 p.m. ET

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Green Bay Packers cornerbacks coach Joe Whitt Jr. may be going unusually hard on his positional unit for early offseason workouts, but it's his job to make sure the team maintains its top-flight secondary. Due to this push for perfection, Whitt isn't winning any popularity contests any time soon, according to Tyler Dunne of the Journal Sentinel.

"My expectations of guys have not changed," Whitt told the Journal Sentinel. "It’s just a different group of guys that we have. I coach them very hard. It’s difficult being around me. They don’t like me right now. And they shouldn’t because it’s very difficult being around me because I know where I want them to get to. Until they get there, it’s not going to be a comfortable place.

"The room will not be a room of comfort because you’re going to do it a certain way until we get it right."

The Packers have solid holdovers at cornerback in Sam Shields and Casey Hayward, but Tramon Williams and Davon House must be replaced after departing in free agency this spring. The top candidates to fill in the gaps are 2015 draft picks Damarious Randall (first round) and Quinten Rollins (second round).

Whitt is worried about time when talking about getting his rookie cornerbacks up to speed.

"Because we don’t have time," Whitt said, per the Journal Sentinel. "This is a young group. It would be different if we had guys who have played the position multiple years in college but I have a basketball player who played one year, a baseball player who played another position and then some small-school guys. So we don’t have the luxury of guys who actually have a background in it.

"So it has to be this way. It has to be this way. That’s what I believe in, so it will be."

If Whitt's sense of urgency rubs off on his teaching subjects, perhaps we'll see Randall and Rollins develop into NFL-caliber playmakers a little faster than expected.

(h/t Journal Sentinel)

Photo Credit: AP Photo/Mike Roemer