Here’s Why Gutekunst Won’t Use Injuries as Excuse for Packers’ Collapse

The Green Bay Packers crumbled beneath a mountain of injuries, though general manager Brian Gutekunst wouldn’t use them as an excuse.

Green Bay Packers defensive end Micah Parsons (1) walks off the field after tearing his ACL at Denver. | Ron Chenoy-Imagn Images

GREEN BAY, Wis. – Injuries aren’t an excuse. They can’t be.

But they are an explanation – a partial one, at least – for why the Green Bay Packers went from trying to scale the Super Bowl mountain to getting swept aside in an avalanche.

Ultimately, season-ending injuries to Tucker Kraft and Micah Parsons were too much to overcome as the Packers went from 9-3-1 and in contention for the No. 1 seed to 9-8-1 and eliminated by the rival Chicago Bears in a second consecutive one-and-done playoff.

In the moment, though, general manager Brian Gutekunst just didn’t see the injuries as a death sentence. And he could look at the Super Bowl ring from the 2010 season as a reason why.

“I just think it’s the mindset,” he said. “I got one ring since I’ve been doing this, and it was the year that we had more injuries than any other (team).”

True, but the Super Bowl XLV champions mostly avoided the type of catastrophic injuries that sent this season careening into a ditch.

Good But Not Good Enough

With Kraft and Parsons out with their torn ACLs, the Packers controlled their matchups against the rival Bears in Week 16 and again in the playoffs. The story of the season – and the tenor of Gutekunst’s season-ending news conference on Wednesday – would have been vastly different had they won the regular-season matchup to position themselves to win the NFC North or held off the Bears in the playoffs.

“I think for me, I felt through the end of the season and into the playoffs we had everything we needed to win those football games,” he said. “Whenever you lose players, but that’s the National Football League, and you have to be prepared for that and you have to be prepared to move on.

“Certainly, it never helps but, at the same time, I never felt underhanded at any time going into these games at the stretch of the season.”

Going into those games, maybe, but they were underhanded, undermanned and overwhelmed in key moments during their longest season-ending losing streak since 1990.

By the final tally over the course of the 17-game regular season, the Packers weren’t hit especially hard by injuries, either in number of players or importance of players. But the timing and severity was a devastating one-two punch. It wasn’t just that Kraft, Parsons, defensive tackle Devonte Wyatt and right tackle Zach Tom missed time during the season. It’s that they sustained season-ending injuries during the second half of the season.

When it was time for Green Bay to play its best football of the season, its best players were on crutches. Including the Denver game in which they were injured, the Packers without Parsons and Tom lost their last five games.

Surely, that’s no coincidence.

From the outside in the moment, the injury to Parsons seemed like a death knell to the season. There’s no “next man up” for the All-Pro, the one defensive player who could be relied on to make a big play in a big moment. As it turns out, that was the case.

While the Packers were good enough to lead big games, they lacked the great players needed to accomplish great things.

“It’s nothing against any other teams here, but you never feel like, ‘Hey, we can’t go win this game,” Gutekunst said. “I fully expected where we were in the middle of the playoff game to win that game and be heading to Seattle and win that game.”

Instead, the Packers quite literally limped into the offseason after blowing a big halftime lead in the wild-card game.

“I think that’s the thing that makes this job – as tough as those moments are, what draws us a lot to it is the competitive nature of it,” he said. “I always say it up here, but that roster building is always 365, and we’re always on top of that stuff.

“To me, if you’re going to do this in those moments, that’s where your leaders better step up and be ready to go. Not only your players, but your coaches, and myself included. So, yeah, those things suck. You never want (to lose) good players. But it’s part of the nature of the business. If you’ve got an answer to get around it, then I’m all for it, but I’ve never seen that. Even these two teams are playing this week, they’ve had their share of injuries, as well.”

Well, Not Really

Not like Green Bay, though. By injury impact, the Seahawks were the third-healthiest team in the league and the Patriots were the healthiest.

Green Bay, meanwhile, lost its best playmaker on offense with Kraft, who was coming off the best game of his career at Pittsburgh, and one of the best defensive players in the NFL with Parsons, who finished third in the league in pressures even while missing the final three-plus games.

Gutekunst referenced the two realities at once when talking about Parsons. Injuries to star players change everything and nothing all at once. The show must go on, even if the team went into a playoff gunfight armed only with a couple pillows.

“Certainly, whenever you lose any players, it takes away from your football team,” Gutekunst said. “When you lose great players, like Micah and Tucker and others, yeah, it’s going to change how you play the game (and) it’s going to change how you try to win the game.

“But that’s the thing about the National Football League, is they don’t pause. You can’t pause. The games are coming. You’ve got to be ready. And we spend an enormous amount of time with our pro staff with the ready list and making sure we have the best answers we can for when those things happen and you get used to it.”

There is no ready list that can replace Parsons, though, which is why the 2025 season came to a premature end. In the quest for healthy knees, perhaps the best the Packers can do is cross their fingers.

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