Acme Packing Company
I was lucky enough to be in attendance for the Green Bay Packers’ tremendous win over the Chicago Bears on Sunday (my annual trip up with a few of my brothers), which means two things:
With point #2 in mind, let’s get to it. In this space, we take a look at the Packers passing game from the previous week.
The Packers have not been a team that has run a ton of plays on offense this season. They’ve been a good offense, and have been scoring at a solid clip on a per-drive basis: per FTN, the Packers score 2.68 points per drive, the 5th-best mark in the league. The problem is that they don’t get many drives. Their 120 drives is tied for the fewest drives in the league this season. Part of that is their average time per drive (6th longest average time of offensive drive), but the other part of it is their defense. The Packers have a good defense, but it’s also very much a bend-but-don’t-break defense. As a result, they are allowing the longest average drives on defense.
Combine those two factors — 6th longest average drive on offense and longest average drive on defense — and you have a compressed kind of game. The offense needs to be efficient and explosive, because they don’t get many chances.
That was fully on display here. The Packers only ran 51 plays, tied for their second fewest number of plays all season. They also turned in their 3rd-lowest pass rate of the season (51%). That’s a long way of saying that Jordan Love may not have had a ton of opportunities to impact this game, but he made the most of those opportunities. He accessed all areas of the field and was efficient in doing it. Love generated 6 explosive plays on his 26 dropbacks, good for an explosive play rate of 23.1%, his second highest rate of the year (just behind the 23.5% mark against the Commanders).
Once again, Love absolutely shredded the Bears defense when they blitzed him. Per NFL Pro, the Bears blitzed Love on 11 of his 26 dropbacks (42.3%). On those dropbacks, Love was 8/11 (72.7%) for 126 yards (11.5 YPA) and 2 TDs. That was good for a QB Rating of 150.0 and an EPA Per Play of +1.01. Just to hammer that point home, every time the Bears blitzed the Packers when passing, Love generated 1.01 points on that play.
Love has been good against the blitz all season, which we talked about in the game preview. That held true here. When blitzing, the Bears only generated pressure on 18.2% of the dropbacks, despite the fact that Love’s average time to throw was 2.75 seconds. They were blitzing, but the offensive line did a...
