Reports from NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport on Saturday morning indicated that the Green Bay Packers and Matt LaFleur were trending toward a contract extension, with those reports noting that LaFleur was not coaching for his job against the Chicago Bears.
But after Green Bay blew an 18-point lead on Saturday night, the conversation shifted sharply. The question is no longer whether LaFleur was coaching to save his job, but how much that collapse may have cost him financially, as leverage in extension talks can disappear just as quickly as a double-digit lead.
“This one is going to hurt for a really, really long time,” Matt LaFleur said after the game. “When you’re in complete control of a football game, and [the] script gets flipped in the second half…it was a lot of self-inflicted things. Give credit to them. We knew they were a team that could come back and fight; they proved it all season long. We had opportunities to put them away and didn’t get it done.”
Once again, the Packers failed to play a complete 60 minutes under LaFleur. Green Bay entered halftime with a 21-3 lead, only to be outscored 28-6 in the second half. The collapse peaked in the fourth quarter, when the Packers allowed 25 points, as the Bears became just the third team in NFL history to score 25 or more points in the fourth quarter of a playoff game – joining the 1934 New York Giants and the 1992 Philadelphia Eagles.
Notably, the Packers allowed 333 yards in the second half alone, while the offense contributed to the unraveling with three three-and-outs in the third quarter. Over Green Bay’s final seven drives, they produced just one touchdown, four punts, and a missed field goal before the end of the game. Instead of stabilizing the contest or protecting the lead, the Packers repeatedly handed momentum back to Chicago, allowing the comeback to snowball.
Entering the 2025 season, teams had lost 135 consecutive games when trailing by 15 or more points after three quarters, including the postseason. There were five such comeback wins this season – the most in NFL history – and on Saturday night, Chicago added another against Green Bay.
Let’s take a step back from the final score and look at what actually happened on the field, because the details only make the collapse more alarming. The Packers scored three touchdowns in the first half. On those scoring drives, Green Bay ran 15 plays from under center and 12 from shotgun.
The second half told a different story. With the lead in hand, the Packers ran just five plays from under center compared to 35 from shotgun. (Before the final drive, it was five under center and 24 from shotgun).
Chicago increased its pressure packages after halftime, which limited some under-center concepts. But that only made in-game adaptation more important. Green Bay failed to counter with quicker concepts. The lack of a “pressure plan,” as Kurt Warner would say, allowed the Bears to dictate the pace and fuel the comeback.
Game management was once again an issue. Late in the fourth quarter, the Packers faced a third-and-10 and burned a timeout to get the right play call – only to come out of that timeout and take a delay of game anyway, which is inexcusable. Later, Green Bay had to burn another timeout on defense because it did not have 11 players on the field. Unsurprisingly, Green Bay sorely missed both of those timeouts during the final two-minute drill.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Special teams played a determining role in a Green Bay playoff loss again. Brandon McManus left seven points on the field with two missed field goals and a missed extra point. Some will hesitate to place blame on Rich Bisaccia for missed kicks, but let’s not be naïve. If this happened once in a while, it would be understandable. Instead, it has become a pattern – showing up whenever the Packers can least afford it.
And, sure, Green Bay even broke out a new look – using Josh Jacobs as a kickoff returner for the first time all season. Undoubtedly the right idea, introduced at the perfect time: January, in a playoff game, during a collapse.
Special teams were also a decisive factor earlier in the season, notably in the loss to the Cleveland Browns and in the tie against the Dallas Cowboys. McManus finished the season just three for nine on field goals from beyond 40 yards. When the same issues keep resurfacing, it stops being bad luck and starts falling squarely on the special teams unit – and its coach.
So, both collapses in Chicago were not anomalies; they reflected who the 2025 Packers were. Green Bay held double-digit leads in multiple games this season: up 10 in Cleveland, 13 in Dallas, nine in Denver, 10 in Chicago, and 18 in Chicago again. The result was the same every time. The Packers failed to close, failed to adjust, and ultimately failed to win a single one of those games.
The breakdown touched every corner of the operation, and Ed Policy cannot shrug off or explain away that type of ending. When a season unravels in this fashion, it forces hard conversations at the very top. Policy now has the latitude to chart its own course, and if that means wiping the slate clean after a collapse of this magnitude, the decision would be understandable.
Policy grew up watching his father run the San Francisco 49ers, where doing what was best for the organization often meant ignoring public sentiment – most famously, he traded Joe Montana. That experience shaped his view of leadership. Now, as Green Bay’s president, Policy faces his first defining call: determining how far he is willing to go to extend LaFleur.
LaFleur will enter 2026 in one of the hottest seats in the league, regardless of whether a new contract is finalized, and the price tag of that extension now carries far more risk than certainty.
