Here Are FACTs Behind Challenge Confronting Packers’ Cam Achord

GREEN BAY – The Green Bay Packers’ special teams, to be charitable, have not been very good.

The kicking game wasn’t good enough under Rich Bisaccia. Or under Mo Drayton. Or Sean Mennenga. Or Ron Zook.

And so on and so forth.

It’s been almost two decades since the Packers fielded a top-10 special teams. The Packers paid top dollar for Bisaccia, only to get the same bargain-basement results. In the Packers On SI Special Teams rankings, Green Bay finished 20th in 2025, 22nd in 2024, 27th in 2023 and 17th in 2022.

It’s that unfathomable history that new special teams coordinator Cam Achord has been tasked with fixing.

How will he give a championship-caliber team a championship-caliber kicking game, where so many before him failed? Here are the facts – or the FACTs – behind that challenge.

“I use the acronym with our guys is FACTs,” Achord said during his introductory news conference at Lambeau Field on Monday. “I developed that in junior college, because everybody I talked to was like ‘Yeah, Coach, FACTs.’”

To help with the acronym, the words are bolded within the rest of the quote.

“It’s focus with the right attitude to compete and doing it together,” he said. “So, if we can do those four things every day, we’re going to end up having success on the field. But it starts in the meeting room, showing up with the right attitude, being genuine and excited. Wanting to go to work – not having to be here, we get to go to work. Wanting to put the time in and just having that rapport with the guys that they’re excited to be out there on the field.

“Once you develop that and you develop the techniques, I think everything else is going to take care of itself.”

The techniques will be key. All the X’s and O’s won’t matter if the return team’s “X” can’t block or the coverage team’s “O” can’t tackle.

“Let’s start with the fundamentals,” Achord said of righting the special teams ship. “When we go out to the field, we’re going to start there. We’re not going to get into a bunch of scheme. We’ve got to do the little things right, because then you lay the foundation. Want to lay a foundation and then we’ll start maximizing that, and it’s putting the guys in a situation to be successful.”

Achord has an interesting background that could lead to optimism or pessimism, depending on how you view it. From 2020 through 2023, he was New England’s coordinator. In 2020, he replaced Joe Judge and led the Patriots to a No. 1 finish in DVOA.

“I think it’s the meticulous attention to the details is the No. 1 and the fundamentals and techniques,” Achord said. “The kicking game is football. It’s running. It’s blocking. It’s tackling.

“It’s everything that encompasses what you do on offense and defense. I’ll refer to offensive and defensive plays with our guys as much as I can, whether it’s outside zone play, whatever it may be, something they register in their brain because they’re coming from playing a lot of offense and defense in college most of the time. Just trying to relate to him in that way and break it down and then maximizing your time on the things that are important.”

The Patriots’ DVOA on special teams fell to 18th in 2021, 32nd in 2022 and 28th in 2023. With Bisaccia’s late departure to take a job at Clemson, Packers coach Matt LaFleur is betting the downward trajectory in New England can be chalked up to the overall erosion of talent at the end of the Bill Belichick era.

Fundamentals – which might as well be the “F” in Achord’s acronym – will be central for fixing a special-teams unit that hasn’t finished in the top 10 since 2007.

“It’s the little things (like) hand placement,” Achord said. “How are your feet? How are you going to strike the guy on protections? Where are they going to be at? The communication aspect – nothing is going to get overlooked.”

No doubt Bisaccia harped on all those things, too, but that didn’t stop his unit from some miserable failures. It probably would be unfair to blame Bisaccia for Romeo Doubs’ botched onside-kick recovery against Chicago or Brandon McManus’ missed kicks in the playoff rematch, but his units gave up blocked kicks in back-to-back weeks against Cleveland and Dallas that turned the potential of two wins into a loss and a tie.

The special teams were caught with their pants down at times. In the 2024 finale, for instance, the Bears scored a touchdown on a trick-play punt return.

“That’s a big part I put our guys on,” Achord continued. “We’ll do all the groundwork. Y’all just show up and make sure you know where we’re at, what we’re going to do. But I think it’s the details is the biggest thing. I don’t like the philosophy of not knowing what-ifs. I like to think about that. Like, ‘All right, what if they did this? What would we do?’ Trying to be proactive and having an answer before you go into the battle on gameday.”

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