After losing Tucker Kraft to a season ending ACL tear, the Green Bay Packers’ offensive infrastructure is in a pretty dark place. Not the talent level, as Green Bay still has plenty of talented players,
headlined by quarterback Jordan Love who is second in EPA-per-dropback this season. The issue is not talent, but how the offense wants to be structured and how that fits the available personnel.
Like the vast majority of offensive coaches, Matt LaFleur would love to run the ball fifty times per game and win. Of course, no one can actually do that at the NFL level, and so no one does. But it is no secret that LaFleur really values what the run game brings to the table, not just in terms of what it provides directly but in terms of counterpunches off similar looks in the passing game. These foundations are found in almost every NFL offense, but particularly those from the ever-expanding Mike Shanahan tree of coaches. Green Bay now finds itself in a place where it lacks the personnel to do that, and to do much of what LaFleur has found as answers in his time in Green Bay.
The Packers rank in the bottom ten of Ben Baldwin’s composite run blocking scores. Josh Jacobs ranks 23rd among qualified rushers in expected yards per carry. This team cannot run block, and while Jacobs is shifty in a phone booth, they don’t generate explosives in the running game at all. Jacobs ranks 28th in explosive run rate despite ranking eighth in success rate. The Packers run game is getting just enough to stay on schedule, but no more. That is no way to live as a good offense, let alone the great one that Green Bay wants to be. Despite this, Green Bay has the third-lowest neutral-situation pass rate in the NFL. They are just banging their head against the wall week after week with a running game that doesn’t work well despite having a passing game that does.
Now, with the loss of Tucker Kraft in the passing game, Green Bay will need to rethink how to structure its passing game. There’s been many a tweet, many an article this week even, about how Green Bay can try and replace Tucker Kraft. The blunt answer is the one our own Jon Meerdink came to earlier this week: they can’t. They can’t because that player simply does not exist in the NFL outside of Green Bay and San Francisco. Kraft is one of the very best YAC players in the entire NFL, regardless of position. He has more YACOE this year than the rest of the Packers’ roster combined. He’s a good blocker on top of this. He is irreplaceable.
Because of this, Green Bay cannot try and take what he does and makeshift it in the aggregate. The Packers do not have any other elite YAC players. Jayden Reed has never been this, despite being a slot receiver, and he is still expected to be out a few more weeks. Matthew Golden has routinely looked subpar when given those opportunities. Romeo Doubs is merely fine in this regard. The closest Green Bay has is Christian Watson, but he is often tasked with blocking assignments on quick-game RPOs. Without Kraft, Green Bay does not have quick-game YAC answers.
If Green Bay can’t run the ball effectively and they can’t reliably generate chunk plays when they get the ball out quickly, that leaves the only option to block it up and chuck it down the field. LaFleur loves to generate explosives, but, like most teams, wants the appropriate look from the defense for those plays. During a presser this week, LaFleur was asked if Green Bay has a tell for some of their stuff in the redzone (implying the screens, RPOs, etc), and LaFleur noted that teams are triggering to those pretty quickly. Green Bay’s offense has become a bit predictable in this regard, especially if other teams are dictating to the opponent what they’re going to be calling or canning to.
This leaves LaFleur in a position he doesn’t want to be in. He would like to run teams out of two-high, but he can’t. The Packers can’t run block and that is only going to get worse by replacing Tucker Kraft with Luke Musgrave. And if teams don’t have to bring extra bodies into the box, LaFleur can’t get the cover-3 looks he wants to generate explosives against. You’ll note that a lot of Green Bay’s biggest offensive games this year came against teams who want to live in either a cover-1 or cover-3 world (or the awful Dallas Cowboys defense). Green Bay won’t have to be the first team to try and throw against looks it would rather not face, but if the offense is going to rank in the top 5 of the league in efficiency, it won’t come from the run game and it can’t come from YAC plays. It’s going to have to come from the traditional dropback passing game, blocking it up, and throwing it down the field.
