Packers promote Ryan Downard to safeties coach, add coordinator title to DL coach Jerry Montgomery

The Green Bay Packers announced on Thursday that they have promoted former assistant defensive backs coach Ryan Downard to safeties coach for the 2022 season. Downard has previous experience coaching safeties at the college level with the Bowling Green Falcons in 2017, his last college job before coming on with the Packers as a quality control coach in 2018.

Downard will be the first full-time safeties coach the Packers employ since the 2017 season when Darren Perry (safeties) and Joe Whitt (cornerbacks) split duties as secondary coaches. While Green Bay hasn’t officially announced it, the assumption is that Jerry Gray, who had the title of defensive backs coach/passing game coordinator in 2020, will be the team’s cornerbacks coach.

In the same press release as the Downard promotion, the Packers noted that defensive line coach Jerry Montgomery was given a run game coordinator title to his job. While Gray was the team’s pass game coordinator defensively, the team had no official defensive run game coordinator in title in 2021.

Montgomery has spent the last seven years in Green Bay, first as a defensive front assistant before being promoted to defensive line coach in 2018. Prior to his time with the Packers, he was a defensive line coach at the college level with stops at Northern Iowa, Wyoming, Indiana, Michigan and Oklahoma.

Green Bay also announced the hiring of three coaching assistants: Ramsen Golpashin (offensive quality control), Quinshon Odom (coaching assistant) and Michael Spurlock (special teams quality control coach.) Odom, who originally worked in the Packers’ front office, was a graduate assistant at Texas last season and will help with Green Bay’s training camp as part of the league’s Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship. Odom did the same for the Buffalo Bills in a running backs capacity last summer.