Acme Packing Company
A pass catcher putting up a 1000-yard season isn’t particularly rare in Packers history. It’s happened 40 times in more than a century of Packers football, dating back to Don Hutson’s 1,211 yards in 1942.
But there won’t be a 1000-yard receiver in Green Bay in 2025, not unless Romeo Doubs really picks up the pace. Through 14 games, Doubs leads the Packers with 578 receiving yards. And as much as I’d like to see Doubs put up 422 yards over the next three games, that doesn’t seem super likely considering he’s never logged a 100-yard game in his career to this point.
The Packers also didn’t have a 1000-yard receiver in 2024, 2023, or 2022, putting them in a four-year drought since the last time they had a receiver hit that threshold. That ties them for the longest such gap in more than 40 years. Previously, the longest streaks are 10 years (between 1942 and 1952) and 24 years (between 1956 and 1980), but those are safely in what I think we could call the pre-modern passing era. Major rules changes in the late 1970s made it much easier to pass the ball, and the NFL has been in the midst of an ongoing campaign ever since to increase passing efficiency.
There are plenty of reasons for the drought (we’ll get to those in a second), and it’s not necessarily a bad thing to not have a 1000-yard receiver; there are plenty of ways to build a great passing attack even without a single dominant pass catcher. But the Packers are fairly unique in their run without a 1000-yard receiver. Every NFL franchise besides the Packers and one other team has had a 1000-yard receiver since 2021 — George Pickens has actually done it for two different teams in that span. The other team? The New England Patriots, whose last 1000-yard receiver was Julian Edelman in 2019.
Now, why haven’t the Packers been able to hit the 1000-yard threshold? Truthfully, they’ve just had a lousy run of injury luck coupled with a fairly unprecedented period of wide receiver turnover, at least in recent Packers history.
When the Packers moved on from Davante Adams, they tried to do a quick rebuild at the position by drafting three receivers in the spring of 2022 (Christian Watson, Romeo Doubs, and Samori Toure) and pairing them with two remaining veterans (Randall Cobb and Allen Lazard) and the newly signed Sammy Watkins. Injuries, coupled with the challenge of getting rookies up to speed in the NFL, put a pretty hard ceiling on the Packers’ individual receiving yards that year. Allen Lazard led the way with 713 yards, but he missed two games due to injury and was limited in a third. Christian Watson, second on the team in receiving yards, also battled injuries that year, as did Romeo Doubs. For that matter, Aaron Rodgers broke his thumb that year and played through the injury, which no doubt limited his efficacy.
In 2023, the Packers...
