Rodgers on 3-3 Start: ‘A Lot of Football Left’

“There’s definitely no panic,” Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers said of a 3-3 start and back-to-back losses.

Author:
Bill Huber
Publish date:
Oct 19, 2022 9:57 AM EDT

In this story:

GREEN BAY, Wis. – At 3-3, the Super Bowl-or-bust team is off to a slow start. It’s three games behind the Philadelphia Eagles in the race for the No. 1 seed in the NFC. After good starts, the team has gotten worse, not better.

Yes, that’s the Green Bay Packers with back-to-back MVP Aaron Rodgers. It’s also the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the 2020 Super Bowl champions, with Tom Brady. It’s also the Los Angeles Rams, the 2021 Super Bowl champions, with Matthew Stafford.

“I will say there’s a lot of people if you’re looking preseason at the NFC, four teams for sure in the conversation (were) San Fran, LA, Tampa and us,” Rodgers said during his weekly appearance on The Pat McAfee Show on Tuesday. “We thought Philly and Dallas were going to be talented. And then Minnesota.

“Those four, for sure, were talked about, and all four of us are 3-3. I don’t think there’s any panic in any of those four places.”

In 2019, 2020 and 2021, the Packers waltzed to NFC North titles by a combined 13 games. It was total domination as they won 13 games an unprecedented three consecutive seasons. Through the first six games of the 2022 NFL season, the Packers are two games behind the Minnesota Vikings in the NFC North and perhaps out of the race for the No. 1 seed already.

If the season were to end today, the Packers would be booking their tee times. With the top seven teams qualifying for the playoffs, they are in eighth place in the NFC:

1. Philadelphia (NFC East): 6-0.

2. Minnesota (NFC North): 5-1.

3. Tampa Bay (NFC South): 3-3.

4. San Francisco (NFC West): 3-3.

5. N.Y. Giants (NFC East): 5-1.

6. Dallas (NFC East): 4-2.

7. L.A. Rams (NFC West): 3-3.

8. Green Bay (NFC North): 3-3.

There are opportunities to move up with games against the Eagles, Vikings, Cowboys and Rams during the second half of the season. But, obviously, the Packers are going to have to play a lot better. There are no layups on the rest of the schedule – not even Sunday at Washington. The Commanders are only 2-4 but they’ve got one of the best pass rushes in the NFL and could get a kick-start with backup Taylor Heinicke replacing injured Carson Wentz at quarterback.

The Packers have to play better – much better – and soon.

After the game, Rodgers thought the best approach to fixing the offense would be through simplification. As part of his explanation, he pointed to scoring drives with “very simple plays and no motion.” He seemed to back off that a bit with McAfee. In complementing coach Matt LaFleur and his staff for their “hard … work” in putting together the weekly plan, Rodgers put the onus on the players to do a better job of executing it.

“The point was, that if we’re not executing those plans, which to be honest, are not the most complex things the majority of the time, then the only slight reaction might be to simplify things even further,” Rodgers said.

““And it doesn’t mean less motions and less checks at the line of scrimmage, it just means, ‘Let’s make sure that the guys can handle what we’re doing.’ It was really an alert for our players. Like, we need to lock in a little bit more and simplify things in our own minds. Even the most complex plays can be simplified in our mind to the simple things we have to do on that play, whether it’s a certain step we’ve got to make or body language we’ve got to use on these plays.

“We’ve just got to be better on the details. That was the real thing I was trying to stress. The details have not been good enough. We’ve had multiple plays where 10 guys are doing something right and one guy isn’t. Or nine guys are doing it right and two guys aren’t on the same page with communication. That stuff just can’t happen. There’s little things, very fundamental things that we messed up on.”

Time is running out. The schedule is going to get harder, not easier. Of their final 11 games, only four are against teams with losing records. Three of those games, including Sunday’s, will be played on the road.

“I knew where we were at, and I obviously follow the league that I play in,” Rodgers said. “I knew where we stood. But I wouldn’t expect any panic in those places. But this is the point in the season, once we get into November and December football, that teams start to separate themselves a little bit. I don’t know that that’s necessarily happened yet.

“There’s some teams that have jumped out a little bit but there’s a lot of football left. We’ve got 11 games left. We have a Thursday night game coming up next month, which gives us two (games) in one week and then a nice little mini-bye. So, there’s a lot of football left. We’ve obviously got to play better. I think that’s understood by everybody, in all three phases. But there’s definitely no panic.”