I’m fully with my colleague Rcon14 when he says the Packers need to go back to square one on offense
, particularly on the ground.It seems abundantly clear what they’ve tried to this point — both from a tactical and personnel perspective — just isn’t working and probably can’t work. Mixing in a few new faces on the offensive line won’t make it any easier to run a complex run scheme, so they really have no choice but to get back to basics and try to maul their way to a ground game.
And maybe I’m setting
myself up as a future recipient of the “Fell For It Again” award, but I think it can work. Maybe it’s the prodigious quantities of copium I’ve ingested, but I really do think they can grind out enough on the ground with revamped offensive line to keep things competitive, and if they can just get to league average pass protection, the passing game should take off.
None of those things are a given, though, and the ground game part of that equation hinges on finding a back who can hammer away behind an offensive line doing whatever they possibly can to get vertical displacement. And looking at the Packers’ roster, the player who best fits that profile is (relatively) recently acquired Kaleb Johnson.
General manager Brian Gutekunst specifically praised Johnson’s fit for an outside zone scheme when the Packers traded for him, but I think he’s got the wrong read there (wouldn’t be the first time), and the intervening three weeks have done nothing to change my mind. Johnson is a 224-pound back who ran the 40-yard dash in 4.57 seconds. To say nothing of what he’s done trying to run outside (short version: it’s bad), Johnson is physically tailor made to hammer away between the tackles.
If the Packers are serious about trying to power their way to ground game success, Johnson’s broad shoulders are going to have to carry the load. Can he do it?
He’s shouldered a significant burden on the ground before. In 35 college games, Johnson carried the ball 20 or more times on eight separate occasions. Six of those eight came in his final college season, including a whopping 35 carries in his second-to-last college game. It’s true, only about 20% of those carries came in a gap scheme (per Pro Football Focus), which is a far cry from the sort of profile we saw from Josh Jacobs the last two years (42% and 47% of his carries in gap plays in 2025 and 2024, respectively), but I’m willing to chalk some of that difference up to the gulf between the college and pro games.
More to the point, the Packers have nobody else. MarShawn Lloyd’s entire running style can be boiled down to the phrase “going nowhere fast,” and Chris Brooks has been counted upon as more of a pass blocker than ballcarrier during his time in Green Bay. If the Packers are going to lean on someone in the ground game, Johnson looks like the default pick.
The Packers have been ramping Johnson up, too. He carried eight times in their Week 2 win over the Jets (a career high) and was on the field for 24 snaps during last Thursday’s debacle against the Falcons (also a career high, and the second-most of any Packers back that night behind Brooks’ 27). The Packers certainly seem like they want a look at him, and he should be a good fit for what they’re trying to accomplish.
He’ll have some tough sledding this week. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers only surrender 3.1 yards per attempt on the second ground, the second-best figure in the league, and they’ve played against much better rushing attempts than the Packers can offer. (I don’t even have to look that up; anybody they’ve played against is better than the Packers.) Things may open up after that, though. Chicago’s 5.1 yards allowed per attempt is the second-worst in the league, and the Dallas Cowboys rank 29th at 5.0. If the Packers can survive this week, their offensive line may be up to speed enough to do something against some weaker opponents as we head into the middle portion of October.
Whatever the Packers are doing, though, Johnson looks like the best fit to be the point man in a new-look ground attack. Can he do the job? It’s hard to say, but it’d be hard to be much worse at this point.
