Acme Packing Company
Before we think about what the 2025 offense could look like, we need to wrap our heads around the 2024 offense.
Along with the rest of you lovely people, this time of year leads to me to start thinking of what the 2025 Green Bay Packers are going to look like on the field. My main area of interest is on the offensive side of the ball, so that’s where I always start.
I try to look at how they operated the previous year with the personnel they had, then I look to the updated personnel (players leaving, players acquired through free agency/draft) and see if it still makes sense to operate in that same way or if we may see a shift. To be clear, there are changes every year to some degree. That’s just the nature of the league changing and the offense changing with it. But I’m looking for potential major shifts — I’m not saying these things will happen, but it’s fun to dream.
Today, we’re going to be looking at how the 2024 Packers operated. A little later this week, we’ll use this knowledge and look forward to the 2025 team.
So what were the Packers last year? Per SumerSports, 67.1% of their offense was run out of 11 personnel (1 RB, 1 TE, 3 WR) and 24.6% was run out of 12 personnel (1 RB, 2 TE, 2 WR). They ran a lot of plays from split-gun, but only 5.9% of their snaps were out of 21 personnel (2 RB, 1 TE, 2 WR). A lot of those split-gun formations had a WR or TE in the backfield. I’m sure you can all close your eyes and see Jordan Love in shotgun, with Josh Jacobs on one side and Jayden Reed on the other.
From a formational standpoint, 92.7% of their snaps came from either 2x2 (33.9%), 3x1 (38.5%) or 2x1 (20.4%), per SumerSports (SumerSports actually separates formations like 3x1 and 1x3, but, for the sake of simplicity, I like to bucket those together). Per NFL Pro, They used play action on 25.2% of their passing snaps (12th in the league), which is right in line with where they’ve been under LaFleur (since 2019, they’ve averaged a 26.1% play action rate, ranking an average of 12th in the league).
In general, the Packers like to operate out of condensed formations. They will run plays out of spread, but they tend to operate out of condensed looks more often than not. Even on snaps where they start in spread, they like to motion one of the wide players a little closer to the formation. NFL Next Gen Stats has ways to track formation width, but they don’t publish the data on a regular basis. The latest data I could find was after the 2023 season, and it paints a pretty clear picture:
We get the 2018 data point, which is nice because it shows how the formational approach in offense changed when Matt LaFleur came...
