Acme Packing Company
If you thought things on the Green Bay Packers-related internet this week were bad, I can inform you that they were just as bad, if not worse, in person at Lambeau Field on Monday night. The Packers offense spent the entire evening shooting itself in the foot between poor offensive line play, hyper-conservative playcalling, procedural penalties, key drops, a derpy Jordan Love fumble, Christian Watson playing defense on a ball that ended up hitting him in the head, and the Eagles calling out the play before the snap on fourth down. I’m not sure it could have felt much worse.
The Packers have a plethora of soul searching to do. The offensive line has played poorly, particularly given the resources put into the unit, and that simply cannot continue. As our own Justis Mosqueda pointed out, they’re just going to have to figure it out, both for this year and going forward, because further attrition is coming. Matt LaFleur has gone from a coach who called running plays a little bit too much, to one of the most conservative play callers in the league over the past two months.
At some point there is going to have to be a come-to-Jesus moment with LaFleur’s playcalling tendencies or this offense is just going to be dead on arrival. They cannot run block to save their lives, but everyone and their mother has already written, podcasted, or radio ranted about this. This is well-covered ground.
The rather obvious pivot if you can’t run the ball is that you’re going to have to pass the ball more, which, on early downs, Green Bay has been quite good at this season. They’ve averaged 8.2 yards per play on first down passes, more than double what they’ve managed on the ground in the same situations. There are a couple of problems the team faces at the moment with that, though.
The first is just going to be part of any discussion regarding the offense for the rest of the year: no more Tucker Kraft. Kraft is probably the most important receiving weapon the Packers have, and he’s not coming back this season. But Kraft isn’t the only one who has been out of late.
Jayden Reed has missed most of the season, but seems on track to return some time in late November, but the other big player missing on Monday night was Matthew Golden. I find Golden’s absence to be the more impactful of the two at this time, particularly with Christian Watson back. The idea of being able to play Watson and Golden together is quite appealing, since both of them have legitimate deep speed that defenses must respect; however, with only Watson healthy, he is forced into running a lot of clearout routes to open things up underneath for his fellow receivers. And that is how you get a situation where he and Bo Melton had the same number of targets despite Watson running about twice as many routes.
While Golden’s statistical...
