Welcome to the end of the Jeff Hafley era.

Matt LaFleur is newly re-signed in Green Bay, but already he faces a big challenge: replacing Hafley as the Packers’ defensive coordinator. Hafley, the darkest of dark horse candidates when he was hired in 2024, leaves some big shoes to fill, especially as the Packers look to rebound from a disappointing end to the 2025 season.

With Micah Parsons returning from a torn ACL and other promising pieces in place, the job should be desirable, especially considering that if the Packers’ offense does its job, the defense should have a fairly...

Now that Jeff Hafley is officially headed to south Florida to be the head coach of the Miami Dolphins, the Green Bay Packers are well and truly kicking off their search for a new defensive coordinator. One day after new broke that Eagles assistant Christian Parker will interview for the job, the Packers have identified a second external candidate for an interview.

That individual is Daronte Jones, who has spent five of the last six years with the Minnesota Vikings. He was Minnesota’s defensive backs coach in 2020, left for one season, then returned to the same job in 2022...

Tuesday morning has arrived, and another NFL team has decided on its new head coach. Overnight, the Tennessee Titans locked in on Robert Saleh, the former New York Jets head coach and San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator, to lead them into the future. Saleh’s will be the fourth new hire of this year’s head coaching cycle, leaving six openings left to go.

Reportedly, the Titans were down to two final candidates: Saleh and Matt Nagy, the former Chicago Bears head coach and longtime Kansas City Chiefs assistant. Ultimately, Saleh gets the job of leading last year’s number one draft pick,...

The Green Bay Packers will interview Philadelphia Eagles defensive backs coach and passing game coordinator Christian Parker for their defensive coordinator vacancy, according to NFL insider Jordan Schultz. According to Schultz, Parker is set to interview with the Dallas Cowboys for their defensive coordinator job on Wednesday and then “head straight to Green Bay afterward.”

Parker began his NFL career as a quality control coach under Mike Pettine, beginning in 2019, head coach Matt LaFleur’s first year in Green Bay. After two seasons in that role, Parker took over as the Denver Broncos’ defensive backs coach from 2021 to 2023....

With former defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley off coaching the Miami Dolphins, the biggest move that the Green Bay Packers will make this offseason will probably be who they replace Hafley with. In talking to those in the know in the coaching and coaching representation space, two names have come up consistently (throughout the year), mostly because of convenience: defensive line coach/run game coordinator Demarcus Covington and pass game coordinator Derrick Ansley, two internal candidates who came to Green Bay after previous stints as defensive coordinators in the NFL.

Along with Hafley, both Covington and Ansley each have [six years of...

The Green Bay Packers will need a new defensive coordinator in 2026. On Monday, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that the Miami Dolphins will be hiring Packers defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley to be the team’s next head coach, following the firing of Mike McDaniel earlier this offseason. The Dolphins also made a change at general manager, hiring former Packers vice president of player personnel Jon-Eric Sullivan to run their front office.

This isn’t the first move that the Dolphins have made to poach from the Packers since Sullivan’s hiring, either, as the team has signed preseason star Omar Brown, who was...

One of the first coordinators to be hired this cycle was not a particularly hot name on the market. Everyone and their mother wants former Miami Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel to call offensive plays for their team next year, but that enthusiasm never built around Drew Petzing, who, like head coach Jonathan Gannon, was fired from the Arizona Cardinals after this season.

Petzing is a 38-year-old who had the offensive coordinator title for the Cardinals before signing with the Lions today. Before then, he had worked with Kevin Stefanski with both the Minnesota Vikings and the Cleveland Browns.

Here...

This past weekend brought Green Bay Packers fans two major positive pieces of news. The first is that the waiting to find out about head coach Matt LaFleur’s future is over, as he signed his new contract extension on Saturday. The second, of course, is that the Chicago Bears lost on Sunday night, as the Los Angeles Rams earned a 20-17 overtime win at Soldier Field.

Let’s address that second point first. Bears quarterback Caleb Williams was his usual Jekyll and Hyde self on Sunday, barely completing 50 percent of his passes. He threw two touchdowns, including yet another bizarre...

One of my favorite stats to check after the regular season is over is which NFL teams won a bunch (or lost a bunch) of close games. Why? Because, to tell you the truth, no one has really figured out how to win close games consistently in this league. For the most part, your record in close games is mostly noise, and it has almost no (positive) barring in your future if you won a cluster of close games the year before. Being good in close games is largely a myth.

Obviously, it’s better to win than lose in the...

In the press conference leading up to the College Football Playoff National Championship, Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti was asked whether he would ever leave for an NFL job, despite Cignetti having a $15 million buyout (cost to poach) and $93 million in guarantees in his most recent extension. Obviously, Cignetti was never going to say, “Yeah, I’d leave college sports,” ahead of the biggest game of his career, but his response was interesting.

He said, “I’m not an NFL guy. I made that decision a long time ago,” which is a pretty boilerplate statement. Then, he brought up the...

The all-star game slate starts this week as the American Bowl began practices on Sunday. After two practices and a walkthrough, the American Bowl will be broadcast on Thursday, January 22nd, on NFL Network at 7 pm CT. The game will be coached by a mostly veteran staff, as Brian Billick’s Warhawks will be taking on Mike Smith’s Guardians.

I wanted to know who the draftable prospects are who are competing in this game, instead of the East-West Shrine Bowl or Senior Bowl later on down the line. So here’s who I found in the 256 prospects on the [consensus...

Hidden in the reporting from the Athletic’s Dianna Russini and Matt Schneidman on the Green Bay Packers bringing back head coach Matt LaFleur is this quote: “In their recent meetings, [president and CEO Ed] Policy didn’t mandate LaFleur make changes with his staff, and a source said neither [general manager Brian] Gutekunst nor [executive vice president/director of football operations Russ] Ball would, either.” If that reporting is true, then staff changes won’t be forced upon LaFleur and probably weren’t a big part of contract talks, which ended up lasting seven days from the Packers’ loss to the Chicago Bears until...