The Packers’ Insane Start on Offense

GREEN BAY, Wis. – The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result.

In some ways, expecting the Green Bay Packers’ offense to be drastically better this season seemed at least a little insane. Because general manager Brian Gutekunst didn’t add any instant-impact players in the draft and his only free-agent addition, receiver Devin Funchess, opted out due to COVID-19, the Packers would be lining up with mostly the same players as last season. The offense in Year 1 under coach Matt LaFleur in 2019 scored a 15th-ranked 376 points – exactly the same number as in 2018 under former coach Mike McCarthy and interim coach Joe Philbin. With those realities, why should there be any belief that the offense would be appreciably better in 2020?

LaFleur hung his hat on a Year 1 to Year 2 jump based on the players’ knowledge of the scheme and his greatly increased knowledge of the strengths of his players. It was a theme repeated so many times that it was practically taken on faith.

History, however, didn’t support that belief.

To be sure, some offenses did take dramatic Year 2 jumps.

In 2015, Dan Quinn was hired as Atlanta’s coach, Kyle Shanahan was hired as offensive coordinator and LaFleur as quarterbacks coach. The Falcons fell from 12th in scoring under the previous regime in 2014 to 21st in 2015. The Year 2 jump, however, was dramatic. The 2016 season ended with the Falcons leading the league in scoring, Matt Ryan winning MVP and the team playing in the Super Bowl.

The Falcons’ success hardly was universal, though. From 2014 through 2018, there were 33 coaching changes. In the first year, 15 offenses moved up the scoring rankings by an average of 13.6 spots, while 16 offenses moved down the rankings by an average of 8.9 spots. Going Year 1 to Year 2, 13 teams moved up the rankings by an average of 7.8 spots, while 16 offenses moved down the rankings by an average of 8.0 spots. (One offense was unchanged; three teams changed coaches again.)

Clearly, the Packers are on the Shanahan/Ryan side of the equation through the first quarter of the season. Green Bay has vaulted from a No. 15-ranked 23.5 points per game to a No. 1-ranked 38.0 points per game. Green Bay’s 152 points, coincidentally enough, are tied with those 2016 Falcons for the 11th-most points in NFL history through four games.

How? How are the same group of players running mostly the same set of plays performing so much better with no noteworthy additions and without an offseason to practice any new schematic wrinkles?

“I give so much credit to everybody this offseason,” offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett said on Wednesday. “Both the players kind of jumping into what we gave them in the offseason, and the coaches learning how to utilize green screens and video cameras and video editing systems, because we just didn’t want to skip a beat.

“And we knew last year, we did get better as the season went on and everybody got more comfortable with the system. But the idea was to take advantage of that and get better in the system. And when we were put in the situation we were [with no offseason practices], we had to be as creative as we could to allow our guys to progress. So, we started doing so many different things from different interactive learning and all this stuff, and I think what it did was it allowed the guys to come in more confident, not re-learning everything, not being away from it for six months. I think their confidence in the system and what we were trying to do just grew so much and we didn’t really miss a beat at all. The guys have showed that on the tape. Our mental errors have been way down. It’s all about the why and we got to explain that why, and I think that’s just so huge.”

For the 2016 Falcons, the second-year leap from Ryan was the key. From 2008 through 2014, the first seven years of Ryan’s career, his passer rating was 91.1. In 2015, the first year with Quinn/Shanahan/LaFleur, his rating dipped slightly to 89.0. In 2016, his rating soared to 117.1.

For the 2020 Packers, the second-year leap from Rodgers has been just as dramatic. After posting a 97.6 passer rating in 2018, Rodgers dipped a bit, just like Ryan, to a mark of 95.4 last year. Now, he’s second in the NFL with a 128.4 rating through four weeks.

Of course, it’s more than just Rodgers. The Packers have allowed three sacks and haven’t turned over the ball. The running game, which was good last year, has been great to start this year. Third down, a blight on the team last year, has been exceptional.

“I’ve talked at length – you guys have heard it – about the stuff I did mentally this offseason that was really good, just developing my own personalized practices and disciplines to get myself in the right head space mentally,” Rodgers said after the game. “That’s helped out on the field being even more relaxed than usual. Obviously, confidence has never wavered but I do feel really good in the offense. I feel like Matt and I are really on the same page – not that we weren’t last year, I just feel like we’re doing so much more.”