Acme Packing Company
After the Green Bay Packers’ loss to the Philadelphia Eagles, Packers head coach Matt LaFleur said something that made my jaw drop. After watching his running backs combine for 22 carries for 76 yards, just 3.5 yards per carry, he stated, “The running game was solid. I thought it was effective.” He might be the only person who was there at Lambeau Field who believes that.
In a league that is increasingly becoming more efficient on the ground, 3.5 yards per carry would be tied for the worst season-long mark of any team in 2025. For perspective, the Philadelphia Eagles have allowed 4.4 yards per carry this season, 11 touchdowns (the sixth-most in the NFL) and 72 first downs given up on the ground (eighth-most in the NFL).
So while the Eagles have some defensive talent, stopping the run this season hasn’t been what they’ve been good at this season. The Packers have only given up 47 first downs on the ground this year, about one-third better than Philadelphia’s rate.
If you want to dive a little deeper into the analytics here, Green Bay’s success rate when rushing the ball was just 33 percent against the Eagles. What success rate boils down to is gaining at least 40 percent of the yards needed to convert a set of downs on first down, 60 percent on second down and 100 percent on third and fourth down. So when the Packers called runs against Philadelphia, they put themselves behind the pace of moving the chains two-thirds of the time. Oof.
Yet…LaFleur thinks that is successful. Overall, the offense lost more by running the football, from an expected points standpoint, than the three points that the Eagles were able to win the game by.
On the night, because of these chippy runs that didn’t prove to be enough, the Packers had to play out 16 third- and fourth-down plays. Against the Carolina Panthers, in their loss last week, the Green Bay offense played 16 more third- and fourth-down plays in just seven drives — more than 2 per drive.
If you can believe it, the Packers were the best team in the NFL in terms of converting on third downs going into the Philadelphia game. A league-average team only converts third downs about one-third of the time, compared to the Packers, who are hovering around 50 percent.
So for most teams, rushing for 3-ish yards on first down would be considered a failure. To LaFleur, though, that’s just being “effective.” I guess it’s worked from his standpoint, as his team has two more wins in the win column than losses in the loss column, but I’m surprised that such few yards per carry would be looked at in a positive light by an NFL head coach in 2025. He certainly won’t be beating the conservative allegations by admitting that this type of rushing performance is “effective.”
Accepting that standard in the ground game, though, means that the team has to count on converting...
