There’s been plenty to praise through seven years of the Matt LaFleur era, but plenty to critique as well. With LaFleur set to enter Year 8 next season and pressure at an all-time high, what has to change?
The obvious answer is finding ways to finish games.
The Green Bay Packers had a 99% chance to beat the Cleveland Browns in Week 3 with three minutes to go and a 99% chance to beat the Chicago Bears in Week 16 under those same circumstances.
If you have a 99% chance to win according to the metrics with around three minutes to go, something unfathomable has to happen to lose. Yet somehow the Packers choked away both games. Just for a cherry on top, Green Bay peaked with a 96% chance to beat the Bears in the playoff loss with a little more than six minutes to go before choking again.
LaFleur’s team became the first since the merger in 1970 to blow three games when leading by 10 or more points in the final five minutes. Including the postseason, Green Bay was 306-1 in those situations. This year, it was 6-3 in that same category.
It’s a jarring statistic that confirmed the nagging feeling that even with a 21-3 lead at halftime and a 21-6 lead entering the fourth quarter in the postseason against Chicago, it never felt safe. If the Packers want to be a serious Super Bowl contender, which is the obvious goal, they have to solve those riddles.
Timeout usage is a tricky element of the game to track. Thankfully, Tom Bliss, the senior manager of football operations data at the NFL, does just that.
No coach in the NFL used more “unnecessary timeouts” on offense this past year than LaFleur. Hell, if you click an article from 2021 on the NFL website that lays out how timeouts are categorized, the post uses a picture of LaFleur as the thumbnail.
Anyways, Bliss labels unnecessary timeouts taken on offense as attempts to avoid a delay-of-game call or as uncertainty about which play to call. Nobody was worse this year in that category than LaFleur.
Look at the playoff game against Chicago for the most recent example. The Packers were leading 27-24, holding the ball with 3:02 to go. They were late getting out of the huddle, and LaFleur exhausted a timeout amidst mass confusion from the offense.
Less than a minute of game time later, Chicago completed a pass for 12 yards and hurried to the line. Green Bay tried substituting, but couldn’t do it in time and burned a second timeout. That falls right into the “unnecessary timeout” for the defense.
How’d that game end in defeat for Green Bay? It wasn’t a turnover the Bears forced, nor was it a turnover on downs. The Packers simply ran out of time and had to heave the ball towards the end zone as the clock expired. It sure would’ve been nice to have a timeout or two left in that final sequence.
For those who wonder if it’s an outlier, it isn’t.
LaFleur took over as head coach in 2019, and in 2023, Bliss compiled the timeout-usage chart for 2018-2022. It’s a pretty large sample size. LaFleur was second-worst, behind only Mike McDaniel, for the most unnecessary timeouts on offense used on a per-game basis. That’s over a four-year stretch! It hasn’t changed much over seven years.
Perhaps worst of all, LaFleur’s teams have shown a reluctance to go for the jugular. When they build leads, they start to play the clock instead of going for the kill shot. Fans want to hear Wayne Larrivee deliver the dagger call on the radio waves.
However, LaFleur’s teams have consistently prevented that. Instead of becoming a team that shells up and gets super conservative in these situations, LaFleur, under more pressure than ever, needs to end games with exclamation points.
There’s a lot of good in LaFleur’s seven years at the helm. If the Packers want to take the next step, finishing games, clock management, and game management need to improve — all in the pursuit of bold, decisive victories.
