Acme Packing Company
If you’re new to this series, we’re reviewing how the Green Bay Packers offense performed in 2025 by down & distance. We’re doing that by building out a call sheet. I ran it all down in my initial post. This is the 7th article in the series, where we’re looking at 3rd & Medium (where “Medium” is defined as needing 4-6 yards for a 1st down). We’ll reference Success Rate & Explosive Rate in this series, so here are the definitions. On 3rd down, a play is considered a success if it gains 100% of the yards needed for a 1st down. A play is considered explosive if a pass gains 16+ yards or a run gains 12+ yards.
After a two-month break to write some draft articles, we’re firing our callsheet series back up. It’s a bit tough to shift gears back into this after writing draft profiles, but I think it’ll feel like a nice, warm blanket sooner rather than later.
As we discussed in our last callsheet article, the Packers were killers on 3rd & Long, ranking 1st in Success Rate, Yards Per Play and Explosive Rate. While they don’t rank quite as well in 3rd & Medium, they still proved themselves to be a force in this down & distance.
On 3rd & Medium, the Packers ranked 2nd in Success Rate (61.5%), 3rd in Yards Per Play (8.2) and 7th in Explosive Rate (19.2%).
If we’re going just by the numbers, there’s a pass rate complaint. On the year, the Packers had a 3rd & Medium Pass Rate of 92.3%, 17th in the league. However, when throwing, they had a success rate of 62.5%, compared to a success rate of 50% when running. That’s really just a matter of opportunities. The Packers averaged 1.5 plays per game in 3rd & Medium, the lowest amount of any team in 2025. They called a total of 2 run plays in this situation all year.
With only 1.5 plays per game in this down & distance, our options are limited in terms of what we can pull from. We’re going to roll with 2 plays on our callsheet: we’ll start with a quick game staple, then hit a slight variant of one of my favorite 3rd down concepts.
You can go back 20 years and find this play in the Packers playbook. It’s been a quick game staple for as long as “quick game” has been a thing. There are different versions of it, but this seems to be the one the Packers favor the most. It involves the outside receiver (#1) running a vertical clear-out route while the inside receivers run quick routes. The #2 receiver will run a quick out, while the #3 receiver has the ability to run a quick out or a quick hitch, depending on the position of his defender.
It’s typically read outside-in. The vertical receiver is the Alert (throw only if the conditions are...
