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This week’s Green Bay Packers depth chart update is going to be a little longer than usual, because we’ll be covering what happened in both Week 13 and Week 14. Because of that, I split this up into offense and defense (for this week only), so keep an eye out for the companion piece out tomorrow on the defense.
The Packers’ offense has gone through a lot of changes in the receiver room over the last two weeks. Not only did Jayden Reed come back, but Savion Williams has been missing and Malik Heath has been waived and claimed by the Atlanta Falcons. On top of that, both Dontayvion Wicks and Matthew Golden are pushing through nagging injuries.
So let’s dive into the data from the last couple of wins. As always, the snaps below are hand-charted and include plays with accepted post-snap penalties (like holding) but do not include pre-snap penalties (like false starts) or kneels and spikes.
Cells in red mean that a player missed the game entirely with an injury. Cells in yellow mean that a player was unable to finish the game due to an injury (officially ruled by the team, which is going to be relevant in Wicks’ case this week). Cells in black mean that a player was a healthy scratch for that week.
The Packers are leaning more into three-receiver sets over the last couple of weeks. In Week 12, Green Bay only played a third of their snaps with more than two receivers on the field in their win over the Minnesota Vikings. In Week 13 against the Detroit Lions, that number moved up to 47 percent. On Sunday, it jumped to 52 percent. For perspective, the season average for the team is around 56 percent.
So, while Green Bay’s immediate reaction following the Tucker Kraft injury (which occurred in Week 9) was to play a lot more three-receiver looks, they quickly disbanded that and have now come back around to being around a 50/50 split over the last two weeks.
We’ve talked about nub sets before, and I want to highlight something here because I’ve been hit up by several people about it this week. Yes, all of Jordan Love’s touchdown passes against the Chicago Bears were out of nub looks, with all of the tight ends on one side of the field and all of the receivers on the other side of the field. This gives the Packers a huge man/zone tell on plays where they line up like that, because the defense has to make the decision to play both outside cornerbacks on the same side of the field (likely man coverage) or not (likely zone coverage).
With that being said, the Packers didn’t actually play nub sets often against Chicago. It wasn’t like when the team played the Washington Commanders (who show Cover 1/Cover 3 pre-snap and have one of the worst passing defenses in the NFL) or the Arizona Cardinals (who play a lot...
