Acme Packing Company
A familiar scene played out at Lambeau Field on Sunday.
On a 2nd-and-12 play late in the first quarter, Jared Goff found Amon-Ra St. Brown for a deep completion along the right sideline. St. Brown made what appeared to be a terrific catch on the sideline, narrowly getting down both feet to haul in Goff’s pass, giving the Lions their first substantive gain of the day.
It was a bang-bang play, one that had potentially saved the Lion from a 3rd and long with Micah Parsons and the rest of the Packers’ pass rush ready to tee off. And it was close — so close, in fact, that Packers’ head coach Matt LaFleur elected to challenge the completion.
And he lost.
Far more often than not in recent seasons, LaFleur has come out on the wrong end of challenges. Dating back to the start of the 2023 season, LaFleur has challenged 17 plays. Just four have been overturned.
LaFleur’s hit rate has been so low that his career challenge success rate is now firmly in the bottom third of the league. LaFleur has been successful on just 18 of 44 challenges in his coaching career, ranking 21st out of 27 active NFL coaches that have challenged a play (five active coaches have yet to throw the red flag).
Among his longer-tenured peers, LaFleur’s success rate of 40.91% is especially bad. 17 active coaches have challenged at least 20 plays. Among those coaches, LaFleur’s success rate ranks 14th. He’s dead last among coaches who have challenged at least 40 plays.
In the grand scheme, LaFleur’s miss on Sunday probably doesn’t mean much. LaFleur had to make a quick call based on very little evidence in a high-leverage situation; had he won, the Lions would have gone from a 1st and 10 on their own 41-yard line to a 3rd and 12 on their own 22. That may have been worth the gamble just on the off chance that the refs happened to see things LaFleur’s way.
But it’s also possible that this is evidence of a game management problem for the Packers’ head coach. LaFleur’s success rate on challenges closely mirrors his aggressiveness on 4th down. In his first few seasons with the Packers, LaFleur was one of the most aggressive coaches in the NFL when it came to going for it on 4th down. But in the past two years, his aggressiveness has cratered. Via RBSDM.com, here’s how LaFleur ranks in 4th down aggressiveness from 2019-24.
And here’s LaFleur’s success rate on challenges in the same time period.
This isn’t a hard and fast conclusion by any means, but the shape of the data here suggests some kind of relationship, and I think that’s a fair suggestion. Challenges and 4th down go/no-go calls are game management questions as much as tactical or strategic moves, and that LaFleur would tail off in both areas so dramatically over the last two years is interesting, if nothing else.
There are possible explanations for...
