Riding high off of an electric comeback win, the Detroit Lions dealt the Green Bay Packers a harsh reality check. In a weak conference and a division lacking a clear juggernaut like the San Francisco 49ers or Philadelphia Eagles, Green Bay’s early success on both sides of the ball translated to playoff hopes for many. Those hopes are still alive with an easy schedule on the horizon. However, Thursday’s loss reminded the league, on national television, that Matt LaFleur’s team is very, very young.
There is no shortage of directions to point the finger. Jordan Love didn’t play well, and he also didn’t have much of an opportunity to. An offensive line bereft of stars Elgton Jenkins and David Bakhtiari poorly protected him. Bakhtiari continues to battle an injury he suffered in 2020 and will not return this season. Detroit’s pass rush, led by Aidan Hutchinson, got home five times. On top of that, the ground game was not there either, at least for the 10 attempts between Aaron Jones and A.J. Dillon. The defense is far from innocent either. Joe Barry continues to take an extremely talented group and produce underwhelming results.
Second-year ILB Quay Walker was also the subject of quite a bit of vitriol. Just as a second-half surge brought the game to within two possessions, Walker’s bone-headed personal foul led to a third David Montgomery touchdown and another two minutes off the clock. It’s something that happens now and then, but it seems to happen to Walker far too often. Last season, he was ejected on two separate occasions for pushing opposing staff members. However, for all the youth and recklessness he’s shown, Walker has stood out as the most physical, downhill, and violent defender on the team. It’s something they clearly need more of.
Former Packers DL Mike Daniels put it best:
Yes, there is a fine line [between nasty and dirty]. We never flirted with that line enough, and it kept us out of the Super Bowl. People were mad at Quay Walker, but that attitude is needed. Top-five defenses have several guys like that. I’d rather have to tell a guy to slow down than pick it up.
A former Pro Bowler, Daniels spent much of his career trapped in Green Bay’s cycle of dominating the regular season and falling tragically short in the playoffs. Many of those collapses were defensive disaster-classes. When you watch David Montgomery churn out four yards with exhausting consistency, only two weeks after Bijan Robinson and the Atlanta Falcons’ punishing attack picked them apart, Barry’s unit looks soft. It’s a characterization that has preceded his tenure as coordinator. In the 2019 NFC Championship game, Kyle Shanahan punctured Mike Pettine’s defense with embarrassingly large holes in a dominating performance.
Walker loves contact. He loves to charge downhill and lay the wood. Like Daniels says, he’s a guy you have to tell to slow it down. And sometimes that is to a comical extent when it involves trainers and staff members from other teams. But the rest of Green Bay’s defense has felt like they need to pick up the energy and physicality for years now. Walker totaled 19 tackles on Thursday, after racking up 17 in Atlanta. He’s playing a brand of defense that the entire unit needs to gravitate towards if they want to give Love and the offense the leeway they need to grow and form an identity.
Detroit’s physical rushing attack is here to stay in the NFC North, and they haven’t even freed Jahmyr Gibbs yet. At the top of the conference, the Niners and Eagles boast some of the best ground schemes we’ve seen in a while. In the NFC South, if the Falcons can find a way to incorporate pass-catching weapons Drake London and Kyle Pitts, Arthur Smith’s scheme could even have legs. If the Packers want to not only succeed in the Jordan Love era, but improve on what held them back in the Rodgers era, they need a way of stopping this type of offense.
An investment of first-round pick after first-round pick has not been enough to build a formidable defense, even if there is an untapped ceiling that could be explored with a new coordinator. Gutekunst has to start looking at physicality as a key trait in draft evaluation.
On many areas of the roster, the pieces are in place. Still, a playoff encounter with Shanahan’s 49ers would likely be a death sentence, and the Packers haven’t even seen them with Christian McCaffrey. As the saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. During the Rodgers era, that applied heavily to the cycle of playoff losses. Now, it lines up nicely with a defense that underwhelms every year. Quay Walker may be remembered mostly as a liability in a handful of bad moments, but Green Bay undeniably needs players like him if they want to get to the next level.
