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Green Bay Packers head coach Matt LaFleur still doesn’t want to talk about his contract situation in Green Bay, at least in front of the media. On both Saturday, after the team’s loss to the Chicago Bears, and Sunday, he said some version of “now is not the time to talk about this” when peppered by questions about whether he will be the team’s head coach in 2026.
What he would dabble in, though, is hypotheticals about his 2026 staff. When asked if he will bring back all of his assistants next year, if he is back, he said that’s something the team is working through right now.
He was also asked if the team would look at an external hire to replace defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley. His response: “All options are on the table.”
This is notable, considering the way things have been done in Green Bay. Most of the staff are from internal promotions. Below is a breakdown of how many years the Packers’ coaches have held (at least) positional coaching jobs with another NFL team:
The Packers haven’t exactly built an experienced staff of grizzly vets, except for Bisaccia. Bisaccia has held an on-field coaching gig with non-Green Bay programs for 20 years before his stint with the Packers. The rest of Green Bay’s staff, 12 coaches combined, have 24 years on their resumes.
If there were an internal promotion to defensive coordinator, it would probably come by way of Covington or Ansley, who have prior NFL experience as defensive coordinators. In all likelihood, Hafley will take one of those assistants to be his defensive coordinator, wherever he ends up landing.
Generally, when a coach leaves the Packers, Green Bay’s answer is to promote the guy leaving with the guy who used to get him coffee, because it is cheap. If you think the team searched the globe for the best receivers coach when Jason Vrable was promoted to passing game coordinator, only to find out that the best man for the job globally was their own assistant offensive line coach, Ryan Mahaffey, then I don’t know what to tell you.
They’ll pay a lot when they mess up big time, like after two straight misses — which happened at both special teams coordinator and defensive line coach under LaFleur — but those are mostly...
