Defensive adjustments were made, but the Green Bay Packers starting cornerbacks had a rough go of it Sunday’s 33-30 win over the Carolina Panthers game, contributing to a career day for rookie quarterback Bryce Young.
The trio of Jaire Alexander, Eric Stokes and Keisean Nixon were targeted 15 times this past Sunday, with Young completing 13 of those passes. He totaled 191 yards through the air, or 14.6 yards per catch, and two touchdowns, both of which came with Stokes in coverage, according to PFF.
Between the three, there were no pass breakups recorded, and of Young’s 36 total pass attempts, only four were contested by the Green Bay defense, with the Panthers’ pass-catchers catching three of them.
Andy Herman, owner of the Pack-A-Day podcast, grades every play of every Packers player over the course of the season. Against Carolina, two of the three lowest-graded defensive players by his metrics were Alexander and Nixon.
This was all part of what ended up being the best performance of Young’s rookie season–and it wasn’t particularly close. He entered Week 16 averaging only 5.5 yards per pass, having surpassed the 200-yard passing mark just four times and finishing a game with a quarterback rating of over 100.0 on one occasion.
However, against the Packers struggling pass defense, Young was 23-for-36 for 312 yards at 8.7 yards per attempt with two touchdowns. Carolina would score on their final three possessions before that last drive where the clock ran out and put up a season-high 30 points. This was also an offense that failed to score more than 15 in eight straight games.
Despite the results and discouraging performance, it’s not as if Joe Barry didn’t make adjustments. According to Next Gen Stats, the Packers blitzed on a season-high 44 percent of Young’s dropbacks. This zone-heavy defense also utilized man coverage on 64 percent of dropbacks–another season-high.
These strategies worked for three quarters, with Young just 3-for-10 against the blitz and 8-of-15 versus man during that span. But Green Bay fell apart in the fourth quarter. Young was 4-for-6 against the blitz with two touchdowns and 7-of-9 for 90 yards and two touchdowns against man coverage.
“We had two three-and-outs to start the game,” said Preston Smith after the game. “We were putting the offense in position to score and doing our part early on. At halftime, they had 10 points, but we’ve just got to make sure coming out of halftime that we are finishing the game strong as we started.”
Understandably so, Barry is going to catch the brunt of the heat for another disappointing game for the defense against one of the worst offenses in football. But with that said, the Packers’ best players in the secondary didn’t execute down the stretch either.
While the players are the ones who have to perform, their inability to do so falls on Barry’s shoulders as the defensive play-caller. Although he made adjustments and tried to be more aggressive, Barry doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore, given how his tenure and the recent weeks in Green Bay have unfolded.
As Barry himself said, everything starts at the top with him. However, that doesn’t make the struggles that the secondary faced against statistically one of the worst offenses in football any easier to digest.
“I’m a firm believer everything starts top-down,” said Barry on the Thursday before the Carolina game. “So everything starts with me. So when things aren’t proper it’s my job to get it right. Now it is frustrating, you’d think at this point things would be running smoothly, but there’s a lot of things that take place in an NFL football game.
“There are so many subtle nuances that have to take place on every single play, with all 11 players. But that’s part of my title as the coordinator—to get it coordinated. And when it doesn’t go right, it is on me and it’s my job to get it done.”