The Green Bay Packers finished the preseason with a 19-0 loss to the Buffalo Bills on Saturday afternoon. Coach Matt LaFleur sat 30 or more players in all three preseason games and predictably lost all three.
Wins and losses just don’t matter in August. Competitors like to win, but the Packers treated the 2021 preseason as an important evaluation period for young players that either needed experience or needed to fight for a roster spot.
The only takeaway from the three games that really matters: no significant injuries. LaFleur’s team is mostly healthy, and an important injury situation lingering into Week 1 (see: David Bakhtiari, Za’Darius Smith) wasn’t a result of anything the Packers did during the preseason. LaFleur protected his most important players, using last year’s lack of a preseason as evidence for why keeping the experienced veterans out of harm’s way was the way to go.
Here are all the other takeaways from Saturday in Buffalo: