Acme Packing Company
I agree with many of my APC brethren that there is not a clear upgrade from Matt LaFleur out there at the moment, and that bringing him back is probably, objectively, the correct thing to do.
However, I’m also getting pretty sick of the Green Bay Packers playing like losers. LaFleur is a great play designer, which is why the Packers often build big leads, but as Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” When the Packers inevitably get punched in the face, all they do is turtle.
The nflfastR model’s Win Percentage metrics are, like their Expected Points Added (EPA) cousin, based on quantifying how often a team goes on to win in a given situation based on what has actually happened over the last three to four seasons. It’s not perfect, of course, as an elite team with an explosive offense, like the Drake Maye Pats, for instance, is more likely to wage an improbable comeback than the Titans. But it’s still generally useful in providing context on where you stand in a given game.
And so my point here isn’t that in all of these Packer games, they had a 90 percent-plus chance of winning. It’s not that exact. However, I don’t think we really need to be THAT exact with our percentages when discussing this problem! My point is that they were VERY likely to win all of these.
And they didn’t win any of them. And that’s weird. Yes, football is filled with randomness, and of course, once the Packers lost Micah Parsons, they became less capable of closing out games on the defensive side, reasonably so.
And remember, only three of these came after the Parsons injury.
And it’s not necessarily even a problem limited to this year. It was more pronounced this year, to be sure, but…
They’ve had some real collapses. And maybe that last one doesn’t seem quite as bad as the 49ers were ALSO above 75% to win it for much of the game, but the Packers rallied, and had the lead and the ball with six minutes to go in field goal range. Just six minutes from victory! And of course, it was conservative play calling and a missed Anders Carlson field goal that got them, because of course it was.
It’s one thing to just run into a superior opponent and lose the game, but teams are NOT supposed to lose quite so many games that they were winning when they were at least evenly matched enough that they should have pulled it off. And it wasn’t the first time it happened against the 49ers in the playoffs.
I know that every team has its failures. Only one team wins the Super Bowl every year, and everyone else will always see some level of disappointment. But this year was filled with a lot of rug pulls, and the Packers rarely end their season getting blown out. They’ve made a habit...
