The Green Bay Packers are not currently a very good football team (sorry for the harsh and flavorful language).
The Packers had a mini-bye week before facing one of the worst teams in football. They looked awful. Then, they had a full bye week against an even worse football team. They looked awful.
We always expected this young offense to have its ups and downs. But it’s a problem when those ups look like they’re in the rear-view window. The bye week was a chance for the team to take some extra time to find out what’s working (not much), what isn’t (most of it), and make necessary changes. The phrase “self-scout” was thrown around by the coaching staff before both the Las Vegas Raiders game and the bye week. So, Nappa, what did the scouter say?
Apparently, nothing. The anemic offense we saw against the Denver Broncos looked like the same one we’ve seen most of this season. Either Green Bay’s self-scouting process is broken, they drew the wrong conclusions, they’re afraid to make necessary changes, or they don’t have the right people in the room, because the results of this bye week were a failure.
Admittedly, this team is so hard to evaluate thanks to the slew of injuries and inexperienced mistakes. Without knowing the intent of the play, it’s difficult for those outside the building to know who is truly at fault for any miscues. Even when a play looks beautifully designed, a single player error can cause the entire thing to come crashing down.
But for all the faults of the young players, this team doesn’t look ready to play at the beginning on each game, and that falls on coaching. Green Bay has scored something like four first-quarter points in the Jordan Love era, and a lot of that comes down to a poor game plan.
LaFleur’s offense has been so static in the first half, with a run-run-pass tempo that just doesn’t cut it in the modern NFL. Even with Aaron Jones back in the line-up, A.J. Dillon (who actually played very well) saw the lion’s share of the snaps and targets in the passing game. It took until the second quarter to target a wide receiver in the passing game, and most of the completions came behind the line of scrimmage.
And in the second half, with the team down multiple scores, LaFleur throws out the conservative first-half approach and goes in the bottom of his bag throwing out full Rube Goldberg-esque designs just to try to get something moving. And while it’s gotten the Packers close to digging out of their low-scoring hell, it’s not quite enough. This is not a sustainable offense!
The bye week self-scout should have found a better solution before facing the league’s worst defense. There were plenty of opportunities to try something new rather than tout the same depressing trappings they did against the Raiders.
Want to really ride the roller coaster? Build the offensive game plan around getting the ball to Christian Watson and Luke Musgrave, your two most explosive playmakers. Instead, Love only targets Watson on deep shots, Love’s biggest weakness, and most of Musgrave’s targets come at the line of scrimmage.
Want to use those two as mere decoys and open things up underneath? That’s also an option, and a great way to get Tay Wicks, who has been excellent when given chances, involved! Wicks has been great with an admittedly small sample size, and LaFleur and Co. need to find better ways to get him involved (his passing play was awesome, though!).
The offensive line has been not very good. Have you, perhaps, considered maybe changing that group up? Despite an insistence to throw out the best five, that never seems to be true. Like, Royce Newman got playtime. Why not use Yosh Nijman over the struggling Rasheed Walker? Or play Zach Tom at center, perhaps his best position? This group has struggled all season, and it’s questionable to think that was going to change.
Despite it not being a great day for Jordan Love, he was on the money on play-action. Love went 9/9 for 90 yards, two TDs, and a 147.9 passer rating per PFF. Also, play-action is supposed to be a staple of Matt LaFleur’s offense. So, maybe include more play-action and more pre-snap motion?
The defense also looked to have its usual issues. But between injuries and knowing what Joe Barry is, I’m not overly surprised.
If I’ve noticed these things and come up with reasonable solutions, then Matt LaFleur and his staff, who are far more intelligent than I am, certainly have noticed them as well. So why did Sunday’s gameplan look almost identical to the one two weeks ago in Las Vegas?
We’ve said time and time again that this is a season for evaluation, and while it’s starting to feel like a coping mechanism more than anything, it only should strengthen the philosophy of trying something different. If you’re trying to see what works and what doesn’t, you’ve got to try different things. I’d feel a lot better losing if I was seeing cool concepts working and rookie receivers having breakouts.
Maybe losing to Sean Payton‘s underwhelming team will be the turning point that the bye week should have been. I still believe in Matt LaFleur and recognize he’s not working with a full deck right now. But something needs to change beyond offering weekly platitudes. Other teams are getting more done with less. Whatever self-scouting was supposed to occur during the bye week clearly didn’t work.
