After Year 1 Leap, What Does History Say About Year 2?

After the Packers won a combined 13 games in 2017 and 2018, they won 13 games and advanced to the NFC Championship Game in 2019.

GREEN BAY, Wis. – Matt LaFleur’s first season with the Green Bay Packers was an overwhelming success.

After the Packers won a combined 13 games in 2017 and 2018, they won 13 games and advanced to the NFC Championship Game in 2019.

A driving force in the turnaround was the team’s close-game dominance. In 2018, the Packers went 3-6-1 in one-score games – defined as eight points or less. In 2019, they went 8-1 in one-score games, that .889 winning percentage being the best in the NFL.

Can the Packers be better in Year 2? Of course. That starts with playing better offense, which might diminish the need to win one close game after another. Three factors fuel LaFleur’s confidence. One, his offensive system is in place. Two, he knows his players’ strengths and weaknesses and should be better able to deploy his personnel. Three, combining those factors, the offense’s starting point when training camp begins will be well ahead of where it was last year. With the foundation set, the Packers should be poised for improvement after finishing 15th in the league in scoring last year compared to 14th in 2018.

“When I was looking at our installs from when we first got here and before we ever had a practice with any of our players, it’s just drastically different. It is drastically different,” LaFleur said recently. “I think when you go through a season with your guys, you kind of find out who’s good at doing what and you find out what you really are good at doing. And it’s our job as coaches to make sure that we’re putting our guys in a position to be successful and really showcase what it is that they do well.”

However, the data doesn’t support a Year 2 “LaFleur Leap.”

And history doesn’t support the Packers replicating last year’s success. In the Wisconsin State Journal, longtime columnist Tom Oates looked at teams that increased their win total by seven-plus games since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger. The findings?

Only three of the 35 improved their win total in the season following their big jump — the Baltimore Colts in 1976, the New York Jets in 1998 and the Los Angeles Rams in 2018. All three had made a jump of seven or eight wins the previous season under a new coach — Ted Marchibroda in Baltimore, Bill Parcells in New York and Sean McVay in Los Angeles — and all three improved even more in their second season under those coaches. If there is a ray of hope in Green Bay, that is it because this is LaFleur’s second season.

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