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 9th article in the series, where we’re looking at 4th & Short (where “Short” is defined as needing 3 or fewer yards for a 1st down). We’ll reference Success Rate & Explosive Rate in this series, so here are the definitions. On 4th 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.
We’re winding down our callsheet series. This article marks our final entry in the down & distance section. After this, we’ll have a couple that cover Red Zone, and I think that’ll be it.
This should be a pretty short article, too (famous last words), as we only have a single play in this section. We’ll get to that, but first, let’s look at where the Packers stack up with the rest of the league. As always, we’re looking at plays outside of the red zone (as it’s basically a different game in the red zone), and we’re excluding Week 18, since that’s just a weird week across the league in terms of running a normal offense.
The Packers averaged 0.8 4th & Short plays per game, tied for 7th in the league. For context, the top team in the league was the Panthers at 1.2. The Raiders were 2nd at 1.1 plays per game. The Lions – known to be one of the more aggressive 4th down teams in the league – ranked 3rd with 1.0 plays per game.
Due to the small sample size of this situation, there are some wild swings in some of the rate data. When you’re only talking about 20 or fewer plays on the season for each team, one failed play can skew the numbers. With that little caveat out of the way, the Packers were middle of the pack in terms of success rate, coming in at 69.2%, tied for 14th in the league. That had them tied with the Rams, and just a tick behind the Ravens (70.0%). Their explosive play rate of 23.1% was 6th in the league.
The Packers had a pass rate of 53.8%, 15th in the league. That’s an area to address. When passing, they had a success rate of 85.7% (4th). When running, they had a Success Rate of 50% (26th). On the season, the Packers were a much better passing team than a running team, and that’s certainly reflected here.
Overall, the Packers were a much better 4th down team in 2025 than they had been over the previous few years in terms of deciding when to go. Here’s to hoping that trend continues into 2026, but with an uptick in the use...
