There’s a lot of angst in the Packersverse right now. Trading for perhaps the best defensive player in football will do that for you. As will having an embarrassing loss to one of the weaker teams in football and
a somewhat just as embarrassing tie to the Dallas Cowboys. Then, the Green Bay Packers followed that up with a… less than convincing nine-point win over the carcass of the Cincinnati Bengals last Sunday. Multi-score wins are not easy to come by in the NFL. Over half of games last season ended within one score, so any multi-score win is a good one, but given the context of what the Packers want to be, and what the Bengals currently are, it’s hard to argue with folks who feel like this team just isn’t what it is cracked up to be. Since a blistering 2-0 start, only being 3-1-1 through five games is a major letdown, even if the Packers currently lead the division by a half-game.
And yet, despite all of this dumbassery of the past three games, no team in the NFC has shorter Super Bowl odds than your Green Bay Packers as of time of publication. In fact, according to Ben Baldwin’s team tiering, which uses betting markets to measure how Vegas views the NFL, no one in either conference comes out ahead of the Packers.
So why the dissonance between sentiment and folks with money on the line? A lot of the Packers’ struggles so far don’t appear to be very sustainable. Two of the Packers’ losses are directly linked to blocks on field goal/XP. Few things in the NFL are less sticky than blocks on the field goal operation. In addition to the blocked field goal at the end of the game against Cleveland, the entire reason that game was close in the first place was because much of the offensive line was either injured or banged up in a matchup that will crush you if you have to play backups. Now, even despite that game still being in the data, the Packers are starting to work their way up the pass protection rankings from the mid-20s after the Cleveland game, to the low-teens this week.
And if you want to tier out total offense and defense, only the Colts come out ahead, and folks are understandably reticent to put too much stock in a team quarterbacked by Daniel Jones.
Despite respective implosions in back-to-back weeks, the Packers offense still ranks in the top 10 in DVOA and the Packers defense ranks second. The Packers offense has done so with a severely banged-up offensive line, no Christian Watson, and mostly no Jayden Reed. They’ve managed to overcome that because Jordan Love has played extremely well this year. Sure, he has two bad interceptions, one of which was absolutely costly in the Cleveland game, but when taking his performances as a whole, few quarterbacks have played better this season. Love leads the league in Next Gen Stats EPA-per-dropback at +0.26 and is sixth in completion percentage over expected (CPOE). If anything, the biggest problem with the Packers’ offense is that they’re currently not throwing enough. Despite Love’s outstanding per-play production, Green Bay ranks 23rd in neutral-situation pass rate. Love has been killing it, particularly on third down, but the Packers should probably start expanding the role he has in early-down offense, and start downshifting their run frequency, particularly with a running game that has struggled to replicate past performance so far this season (albeit with an offensive line injury caveat).
As fans, it is easy to get lost in the sauce of your team’s own stupid idiosyncrasies, and that’s not to say there are no problems with the Packers. I wrote about them over the bye, but it’s also important to contextualize those problems within the league. The Packers still remain a legitimate Super Bowl contender, and sit atop the division while, hopefully, working out the stupid kinks. As they go and likely face a quarterback this week, it offers yet another opportunity for them to be serious and take care of their business. Every loss is expensive at the top, and the top is where the Packers sit.
