The Green Bay Packers’ Week 5 bye looked too early when the season schedule was announced. Now, it seems to be coming at the perfect time.
After looking like the belle of the ball the first two weeks of the season, handily defeating two of 2024’s top NFC teams, the Packers didn’t win their next two against much less fearsome teams.
The Packers blew double-digit leads against both the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Cowboys and are trending in the wrong direction. Thankfully, the NFL season is young, the Packers are a good team, and the bye week is here so the team can sort itself out.
Too often, this team plays with its food, allowing mediocre or subpar teams to hang around for too long. Every platitude about “any given Sunday” and “the other team plays to win, too,” applies. Still, the Packers should be delivering the coup de grâce to these inferior teams.
In a tough division where the three other teams despise you and a conference where good isn’t good enough to win it, the Packers need to hone their killer instinct to live up to their Super Bowl aspirations. This team is heading toward “good, not great” territory again, and Green Bay needs to use the bye week to root out the underlying causes.
The Packers appeared to be the best team in the NFL for the first two weeks of the young season, and they remain a strong team despite recent setbacks. There’s no reason to cry that the ship is sinking. But the past two weeks have shown that Green Bay hasn’t been the shark in the water it needs to be to finish off opponents.
Football is a game of moments and momentum. It’s why, despite controlling the game for 55 minutes, the Browns left Cleveland with their only loss this season. It’s how a blocked PAT attempt turned Sunday’s game from a spanking to a stressful back-and-forth ending in a tie.
In both games, the Packers appeared to be the better team for most of the game before losing their momentum.
Again, the other team is also playing to win. However, when the Packers consistently take their foot off the gas and then put it back on, it’s difficult not to be critical.
Matt LaFleur is an excellent head coach, but some of his tendencies are holding the team back from greatness.
The run game has struggled this season, and LaFleur will try to establish it at odd times. LaFleur loves the ineffective second-and-long run calls. Even when the pass game is working and Jordan Love is hot, LaFleur will move away from the plays that work.
LaFleur’s playcalling becomes conservative, playing not to lose instead of playing to win. That was fully on display in Dallas at multiple times. Early, the Packers punted instead of attempting a fourth-and-two that could have put Dallas in an inescapable hole. In fairness, LaFleur had reason to trust the defense, which did its job on the following drive. But he passed up an opportunity to make a statement.
Later, during Green Bay’s final drive of regulation and on its lone overtime possession, LaFleur opted for a tie rather than attempting a win, despite his offense’s dominance over the Cowboys’ defense. To end the regulation, he ran the ball and attempted a deep pass, trying to eat up the clock and get a field goal rather than go for the win with a touchdown.
In overtime, he played with questionable aggressiveness and baffling clock management. It seemed he didn’t want to risk Brandon Aubrey‘s fearsome kicking range by chewing clock.
LaFleur was once one of the league’s most aggressive coaches, and maybe that was a symptom of having Aaron Rodgers rather than being LaFleur’s MO.
Being aggressive isn’t an automatic path to success. The Packers foolishly tried to be overly aggressive at the end of the first half, which led to costly mistakes and Dallas taking the lead before halftime.
Dan Campbell is one of the league’s most famously aggressive coaches, and it hasn’t yet translated to significant postseason success. Still, controlling the game and defining how it is played is always better than leaving it up to chance, or worse, your special teams group.
Special teams has cost the team points in each of the last three games, and it’s hard to be optimistic that’ll change anytime soon. Better to let your offense define the game and force the opponent to become one-dimensional.
Ideally, LaFleur doesn’t learn the wrong lesson from the end of the first half.
“There’s a lot of things we all have to clean up, starting with myself,” LaFleur said following the tie. “You’re trying to be aggressive at the end of the half, and that really bit us in the butt.”
This offseason, offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich said he wanted this team to be more physical and more aggressive. The Philadelphia Eagles set the standard in the NFC thanks to their aggression and their dominance in the trenches. The Packers need to use the bye week to get back into that mentality.
Matt LaFleur always holds himself accountable and is the first to take responsibility when the team doesn’t meet expectations. The past two weeks have been humbling for the head coach, and the bye week is coming at the right time to evaluate his approach.
When the Packers take on the quickly floundering Cincinnati Bengals in Week 6, it’s an ideal stage to show what they’ve learned about themselves. Ideally, Matt LaFleur’s squad will come back healthier and with a sharpened killer instinct.
