Acme Packing Company
For all the talk about how cornerbacks were going to be the liability of this Green Bay Packers team going into the playoffs, it was really the Packers’ linebackers who cost the team the most through the air in their loss to the Chicago Bears. Yes, the cornerbacks gave up a couple of big plays, but some of those plays were also just flat-out incredible throws by Bears quarterback Caleb Williams, who was able to beat a couple of Green Bay’s pressures.
Here, I want to show you the mistakes (a lot of them mental) that the linebackers made on Saturday, which ultimately fueled the fire of the Packers’ fourth-quarter collapse.
Let’s start this with a brutal third-and-long conversion on the first drive of the game. The guy you’re going to want to watch here is linebacker Edgerrin Cooper (#56), at the top of the screen in the slot. It’s an empty formation, so fellow linebacker Quay Walker (#7) is inside leverage of the third man (outside in) at the bottom of the screen. The Packers are playing quarters, so Cooper has the flat responsibility up top.
Cooper collisions to reroute the slot (good), and since the slot is going vertical, he passes him off to the safety (also good). From there, Cooper should realize he has all of the outside receiver underneath, since there’s no other threat to his side of the field. That is what cornerback Keisean Nixon (#25) communicates when he points at the receiver running an in-cutting route (Nixon is passing him off to Cooper and presumably is communicating this verbally, too).
Williams holds his eyes, though, looking (his) right of Cooper to a man who does not exist in the area. By the time Cooper figures out that Williams is looking at a phantom receiver, Cooper’s coverage assignment has already crossed his face for a wide-open first-down conversion after it finally looked like the Packers had the Bears’ offense on the ropes.
The next play I want to look at is a basic Cover 3 call on defense, with the cornerbacks playing sideline zones, safety Evan Williams (#33) playing the middle of the field, the linebackers playing hook zones and slot defender Javon Bullard (#20) and drop-down safety Xavier McKinney (#29) playing the flats.
Walker doesn’t get enough depth in the hook, leading to a wide-open in-breaking route. Big play. First down. At a minimum, Walker could have made this window smaller. It’s a good call into Cover 3, but it’s not that good.
This is quarter-quarter-half, with the bottom of the screen playing quarters/Cover 4 and the top of the screen playing Cover 2, even though it looks like Cover 3 (with a safety in the middle of the field) pre-snap. This is a disguise look, a changing of the picture of the coverage post-snap after walking up linebacker Isaiah McDuffie (#58) over the center to draw attention away from the coverage.
The Packers only send four, so McDuffie drops into the hook, as...
