If it's a new week there must be new Packers

You know that old saying, "You can't tell your players without a program"? Perhaps never has that been more true for fans of the Green Bay Packers than this season.

We're just coming up on the half-way point and there are now 10 Packers on the season-ending injured reserve list, eight of them from the defense (see my post from Tuesday regarding the situation Dom Capers has been dealing with as the defensive coordinator). Defensive lineman Mike Neal and linebackers Brady Poppinga and Brad Jones -- the latter of the Favre-ankle-fracture tackle -- are the latest.

So, over the course of this week, GM Ted Thompson has had to find some bodies. He's added several linebackers and a D-lineman who, perhaps not coincidentally, was picked up on waivers from the Packers' next opponent, the Jets.

You can read more about the new pick ups in the following articles: DT Howard Green, LB Erik Walden, LBs Diyarl Briggs and Erik Wilhelm.

To make room on the roster, LB Maurice Simpkins was cut.

With CB Al Harris and S Atari Bigby ready to be activated either this week or next, the roster is still very much in flux.

While the Packers' linebacking corps has certainly been decimated with injuries, it's interesting that only one defensive lineman has been added given its current lack of depth, as well. Sunday evening against the ViQueens, for example, the Pack was down basically to only three available D-linemen: B. J. Raji, C. J. Wilson and Jarius Wynn. Ryan Pickett was sidelined after a mere seven snaps with a bum ankle and Cullen Jenkins -- already playing one-handed with his other in a cast for the rest of the season -- strained a calf muscle in warmups and was unable to play.

There's no other team in the league that has been hit as hard as the Packers with injuries this early in the season: 10 players on IR among whom are eight members of the defense and which also includes five starters from both sides of the ball. Wow.

If somehow Thompson and the coaches can keep this all together with string and baling wire it will be one heckuva personnel job from top to bottom. Still a long way to go in the season. But it can't get any worse from an injury standpoint, can it? No, really, it can't. Can it???