Interesting thought, Tampa!

The question would be whether his 'improvement' came from Starr himself actually getting better, or whether it was more due to factors outside of the player itself. Like you, I wasn't around to see him play, so I have no way to tell how he played/looked when he played those first couple of years.

But what really interests me on the subject is this:

I think it's safe to say that when Starr "got good", there was another pretty big change that happened on the team at that same time - they changed the head coach from Scooter McLean to some guy named Lombardi.

And like Starr, Favre suddenly got a whole lot better (I mean, like it was two different guys) when he got away from Glanville (who basically hated the guy's guts) and got to a MUCH better coaching/QB development situation under Mike Holmgren.

I would most certainly agree to amend my earlier statement to include the caveat that "more significant improvement CAN happen IF there is a coaching change or other significant change in circumstances/etc." I'm thinking of a guy being drafted as an EDGE rusher in a 3-4 when his body type etc. is much more suited to 4-3 DE... or maybe a RB stuck in a power run scheme when he's much more suited to zone... or (like in Starr/Favre's case) the team fires a terrible coach/GM/etc. and brings in a new 'group of higher ups' that is WAY better than the old.

But I still stand by my earlier statement that the same player, with the same coaches, in the same systems, with mostly the same guys around him, and no extenuating circumstances... there is a ceiling to just how big of a change (up or down) you'll see year to year, as well as how big of a change you'll see in that player cumulatively over the course of a career. All talent has a floor and a ceiling... and I just don't think, in most cases, that there's that big of a gap.

I think, also, that this has been especially true of the Packers, who (at least for Thompson's tenure, and I think into the early years of Gute) have tended to take more 'high floor, low ceiling' types of players in the draft. They haven't made many 'boom or bust' type picks, really, at all. So when considering this philosophical question from the OP, I think that for our purposes we can filter it down from "do players improve" to 'can THESE (GB) players improve?' And in our case, I think you're really looking at a LOT of 'high floor, low ceiling' types of players - so again, in many cases there's not a lot of room for improvement just because they were never that 'sky's the limit, high ceiling' type of player to begin with.