Jaire Alexander is the Green Bay Packers’ best cornerback. But he was injured in 2021, missing all but the first four games of the season due to a shoulder injury. As a result, Alexander missed both Packers games against their NFC North opponent, the Minnesota Vikings.
So, maybe the Packers’ defensive staff forgot that Alexander was available in Week 1 of the 2022 season to cover Justin Jefferson, one of the best receivers in the league?
That’s certainly what it looked like. In a 23-7 Vikings win, Jefferson went all thermonuclear against the Pack, as is his wont. He caught nine passes on 11 targets for 184 yards and two touchdowns. That 184 yards, by the way, was just 11 yards less than the 195 passing yards Aaron Rodgers had in this entire game.
But we digress.
Back to the Packers’ defense, and the plan — such as it was — for covering Jefferson. After the game, head coach Matt LaFleur was quizzed about why Alexander wasn’t following Jefferson all around the field.
“Yeah, it doesn’t necessarily always work that way in terms of — if you just commit to playing man coverage the whole game, sure, you can do it. But they do a nice job of putting them in different positions, whether it’s in the slot, whether it’s motioning. It seemed like he was in motion quite a bit, just moving him all over the place. You’ve got to give them credit. They put him in premier spots and attacked our coverage well, and certainly we had a couple blown coverages, as well, where we’re cutting him loose, and if there’s anybody you don’t want to cut loose, it’s No. 18. We’ll go back and look at the tape. Obviously, again, we have to coach so much better.”
The Packers’ plan was to zone it up a lot, and have different defenders on Jefferson. This certainly was a pleasant surprise for Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins.
“I would be a little surprised, yep,” Cousins said when asked if he expected Jefferson to get better and more compressed coverage. “Whenever he has a game at that magnitude, not because of him, but you expect him to get taken way a little bit, and he will at times. Our coaches are trying to find ways to still keep him involved, and we were able to do that today. So it’s going to be kind of a conversation we had a lot last season, and we’ll have this season each week of how does he get defended.”
It was not a pleasant surprise for Alexander.
Jaire Alexander to me and @RobDemovsky postgame on coaches not having him shadow Justin Jefferson: "All week, (I was) asking for that matchup. But it ain't about me. It's about the team. It ain't about me. If it was my way, you know what I would be doing."
— Matt Schneidman (@mattschneidman) September 12, 2022
Based on my charting, Alexander was not the closest defender to Jefferson on any of his 11 targets. New Vikings head coach and offensive play-designer Kevin O’Connell, fresh off his two-year tenure as Sean McVay’s offensive coordinator with the Rams, did a masterful job of aligning and motioning Jefferson away from Green Bay’s most formidable pass defender. LaFleur brought this up, of course (one offensive coach appreciating another offensive coach), and it certainly showed up on the field. Here’s how the Jefferson distribution looked on Sunday:
Safety Darnell Savage, Jr.: Three targets, two catches, 57 yards, one touchdown.
Cornerback Rasul Douglas: Three targets, three catches, 75 yards.
Cornerback Eric Stokes: Two targets, two catches, 25 yards, one touchdown.
Linebacker Quay Walker: One target, one catch, 22 yards.
Edge-rusher Preston Smith: One target, one catch, five yards.
Safety Adrian Amos: One target, no catches.
So, When you have a rookie linebacker in Walker, and a veteran edge-rusher in Smith, covering the other team’s alpha-dog receiver more than Alexander did, that would seem to be less than an ideal plan. Moreover, the strategy to play a bunch of zone against Jefferson really didn’t work because again, O’Connell did some great stuff to beat it.
So, where did the Packers get it so wrong? Let’s go to the tape.