Packers Searching for Simple Solutions to Broken Offense
GREEN BAY, Wis. – The Green Bay Packers have grown accustomed to playing one half of good football on offense.
On Sunday against the New York Jets, they didn’t bother to play any.
In one of the worst offensive performances of the Aaron Rodgers era, the Packers were shellacked 27-10. The Packers hadn’t been booed off the field since the dying days of Mike McCarthy’s tenure as coach. It might have been that long since they played 9 meaningless minutes of football in a home game.
Mark Twain famously said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” These stats spoke nothing but truth.
- The Packers averaged 4.0 yards per offensive play, worst in any home game under coach Matt LaFleur.
- They averaged 3.0 yards per carry.
- Given a combined 29 carries (19) and targets (10), Aaron Jones and AJ Dillon gained 96 yards.
- Rodgers was sacked four times and took nine quarterback hits.
- They were a combined 5-of-20 on third and fourth down.
- On 13 possessions, they had zero or one first down 10 times.
Otherwise, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
Perhaps this is the most unbelievable stat: The Packers’ defense held the Jets to 1-of-11 on third down. Yet, the Jets became only the third team since the start of the 2019 season to win a game while converting less than 10 percent of their third downs. And they won by 17!
Why can’t the Packers get anything going with any consistency on offense despite having a four-time MVP quarterback and a wunderkind offensive mind?
“Yeah, that’s a great question. That’s a fair question. I don’t know,” LaFleur said. “I mean, obviously, if I knew, we wouldn’t be in this spot, right? We’re in a pretty bad predicament right now.”
Rodgers lobbied for a more simplistic approach to get the offense out of that predicament. Rodgers complimented LaFleur and his staff for their creativity, diligence and work ethic. If LaFleur won on the chalkboard, he got his rear kicked on the not-quite-frozen tundra.
“If it’s not working, it’s not because those guys aren’t grinding,” Rodgers said of the coaches. “It’s because we’re not executing. If you think we have the right players, then we need to simplify things. If you don’t, then that’s a whole other conversation.”
The battle between simple and scheme has been a yearly tug-of-war, Rodgers said. In his opinion, sometimes, the volume of scheme and creativity isn’t a good thing. When Davante Adams was on the roster and converting third downs and catching touchdowns, the Packers sometimes could make it work, Rodgers said. Without Adams, and with the execution being so inconsistent, the offense has fallen on hard times.
“This is not a new thing what I’m saying to you,” Rodgers said. “This has been a part of every season. Even in 2019, when it looked like we were gangbusters to start the season. But there were times where we needed to just rein it in a little bit, ‘Let’s just simplify some things. Make sure guys are playing with a little bit more confidence.’
“That to be said, the standard is the standard and the plays that we had in were easily understood and executable, so this is not an attack on the staff at all because they put in the plan that can win football games. But, the execution, when it looks like that, it’s not good enough. So, we do probably need to rein in a little bit. But, like I said, this has happened in ‘19 and ‘20 and ‘21, all the same, it’s just different personnel, different years, different momentums, different energy.”
Is Rodgers’ simple-is-better approach correct, or just simple-minded? Right tackle Elgton Jenkins, coming off a strong performance vs. the Giants, was flagged twice for holding. Right guard Royce Newman was benched, only to go back in the game when Jake Hanson suffered an injured biceps. The Packers couldn’t pick up a stunt if Evel Knievel were at quarterback.
Plus, there were four dropped passes and a fumble on a simple third-and-1 handoff. Rodgers said he has to raise his level of play “a little tick,” which seems a little bit of an understatement.
Added together, Green Bay has scored 107 points in the first six games of the season. No Packers team has scored fewer since 1992, when Don Majkowski opened the season as the starter before being replaced by Brett Favre. According to ESPN Stats & Info, that’s also the fewest points in any six-game span with Rodgers in the lineup.
“We’re going to find out a lot about ourselves moving forward, where we are right now and how we respond,” LaFleur said. “I believe in the guys in the locker room. We’ve got a great group of men, and I think that everybody’s going to stick together through this and we’re going to continue to scratch and claw and fight our way out of this.”
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