Acme Packing Company
The Green Bay Packers’ loss to the Carolina Panthers was a very painful rewatch, filled with self-inflicted wounds by the Packers. Maybe you don’t want to re-live it, but I had to, to figure out what sort of changes Green Bay made to their depth chart and game plan this weekend. So here is the fruit of my painful labor.
As always, the numbers in the tables below tell you how many snaps the team played each player or personnel group in a given week on offense or defense. Plays with pre-snap penalties (false starts, etc.) do not count in our data, but plays with post-snap penalties (defensive pass interference, etc.) do.
If a cell is highlighted red, that means that the player was not active for the game due to injury. If the cell is yellow, it means that the player dropped out of action in-game because of an injury. If the cell is black, that means the player was a healthy scratch.
Now, let’s dive into the Packers’ depth chart.
First of all, I want to talk about the incredibly frustrating start to the game. On the first drive, the Packers were set up with a 1st and 10 on the Carolina 16. They fumbled on that play on a rep where Savion Williams didn’t know where to line up on a screen that was thrown to him.
On the second drive, the Packers drove to the Carolina 18. After two false starts and a sack, though, they only came away with a field goal. If you can believe it, Green Bay’s next drive was a two-minute drill, where the clock became a factor and they ultimately had to settle on another field goal. The next drive, Tucker Kraft was injured.
They could have gone up early, forcing the Panthers to actually have to pass the ball in this game, but they let them hang around. Brutal.
Okay, on the topic of the Packers’ personnel in this game, this was the team’s season-high usage of 11 personnel (1 running back, 1 tight end and 3 receivers) at 71 percent. For perspective, the team opened up with a 38 and 48 percent 11 personnel rate in Week 1 and Week 2, and recently played 11 personnel just 45 percent of the time against the Arizona Cardinals in Week 7.
This was the plan coming into the game, not just when Kraft was injured. If teams are going to sit back and play two-high zone coverages, it seems like the Packers are going to want to play more receivers. This happened previously against both the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Cowboys. Here’s a fun tidbit: When the Browns played the Packers, it was Jim Schwartz’s second-highest rate of two-high safeties in his NFL career. Schwartz has been a play-caller in the NFL since 2001.
The book is sort of out on Green Bay’s current version of their offense. They don’t run the ball well. Outside of Kraft, who...
