In sports, when things aren’t going well, a good step in the right direction usually consists of going back to the basics and simplifying things. This is what the Green Bay Packers offense needs to do over the bye week.
Rather than seeing progress from this unit, the offense has largely been going backwards over the last three games, excluding their fourth-quarter performance against New Orleans. Green Bay has totaled just six points combined in their last three first halves of football.
For three quarters against the Saints, the Packers were shut out. Versus Detroit, the offense averaged 4.3 yards per play, which over the course of the 2023 season would have ranked 30th in the NFL. Most recently, against Las Vegas, Jordan Love threw for 182 yards with three interceptions, and the offense as a whole looked disjointed, putting up just 13 points.
“Trying to reflect on it from a coaching standpoint,” said Matt LaFleur on Tuesday, “it’s great we have this big ol’ call sheet with all these plays to attack certain looks or whatever it may be, and it really doesn’t matter if you can’t execute it.
“Just from a coaching standpoint, we may have to look at just how much are we putting in on these guys because, you’re right, we do have a lot of young guys. Although we didn’t have a ton of mental mistakes, it’s just that we did have a few in some critical situations that we can’t have.”
It sounds like coach speak when LaFleur is at the podium and says that all 11 players need to play better and be on the same page and that, as a play-caller, he needs to put his team in better positions to be successful. But that is 100 percent the case with this Green Bay Packers team.
This is a young offense that is not executing properly, and the finer details are being missed. This then snowballs and leads to dysfunction when it’s happening play after play and oftentimes when multiple players within one play are failing to execute their responsibility effectively.
Love currently ranks 34th out of 34 eligible quarterbacks in completion rate. The pass catchers have to be more precise with their routes to ensure they are in the right place at the right time, not to mention the need to make more contested catches. The offensive line has struggled to create running lanes, along with the pass protection breaking down at times over the last two games.
“There was a lot of opportunities out there, particularly in the screen game. I mean we had some premier looks, and we aren’t getting any yards in our screen game. Then there was some other ones that should have been explosive gains, and we are getting like six or seven yards.
“We had a quarters beater dialed up on the deep ball to Christian, they’re playing low quarters, they give us the look and we don’t connect. So I think there’s a lot of things that if we execute and make the plays then a lot of this stuff goes away.”
To a degree, this is what the Packers signed up for this season with so much inexperience on one side of the ball. This is where the LaFleur scheme and the illusion of complexity, as he often talks about, has to be able to do some of the heavy lifting for these players.
In short, the illusion of complexity conceptually keeps things relatively simple for the offense but should still leave the defense guessing by running a variety of plays from just a few personnel packages to help create mismatches and by running like-plays that look the same initially but actually end up quite different.
LaFleur has to strike a balance between continually building upon the concepts that have been established but not putting too much on the plates of these young players. In theory, trying to catch the Raiders off-balanced by running an end-around to Christian Watson makes sense, but for an offense that has struggled to create running lanes on inside and outside zone runs – staples of the LaFleur offense – calling a play where six or seven blocks have to be executed perfectly in order to find success was probably not the right decision.
“That’s always the trick,” LaFleur said. “You would like to hopefully dress up whatever concepts guys are used to running, and they feel confident in, and just dress them up in certain ways, whether it be by motion or formation or whatever it may be, personnel. So it’s simple for us, but it gives the defense a different look.
“I just think there is probably more we try to carry more over on a week-to-week basis instead of going a whole new direction based on the team we are playing. The more carryover, these guys have banked reps at it and feel a little more confident at it. Sometimes that doesn’t always work.”
Right now, defenses do not have much to fear when it comes to this Packers offense. They can’t run the ball efficiently and have been very poor at connecting on downfield pass attempts. This results in the defense shrinking the field and muddying things up over the middle, which, in part, limits what LaFleur can do from a schematic standpoint and provides less space for the pass catchers to operate within.
If the offense is going to turn things around and find some sort of consistent success, they’ll have to improve in at least one of those areas–the run game or deep passing game. Step one to accomplishing this begins with improved execution, and that starts with LaFleur taking a look at what he’s asking this young team to do each week.
The bye week provides the Packers a much-needed opportunity to hit the reset button and go back to the basics of what the LaFleur offense wants to accomplish, which includes motion, play-action, utilizing the middle of the field, and maximizing YAC opportunities. Once those details and concepts are being executed consistently, the team can build off of that as they dive deeper into the playbook.
“I never want to fall back on that (inexperience) because I think it’s such an excuse,” said LaFleur. “It is what it is. We are going to play with the guys we have, and I believe in the guys we have. And I do think we do have a lot of talent. I think we all knew there was going to be some growing pains along the way.
“But I haven’t lost faith or belief in the group we have. I just think we can do some things better, and we can coach better, and we can execute better.”