The Green Bay Packers have spent the last couple of years, the seasons with Josh Jacobs on the roster, utilizing a fundamentally different running game than they had in Matt LaFleur’s first few seasons in Green Bay. LaFleur had come from the long-storied Shanahan tree of coaches, and had coached with both father Mike and son Kyle. He was an offensive assistant under Gary Kubiak, a Mike Shanahan disciple, and was Sean McVay’s non-playcalling offensive coordinator in Los Angeles, both of whom had worked
together under Mike Shanahan.
What all of these coaches have in common, in the times that LaFleur was there, is that they were extremely heavy users of zone blocking in the run game, particularly outside zone. When LaFleur came to Green Bay, the Packers had been utilizing a very similar running game to what LaFleur had come from for over a decade, with Mike McCarthy overwhelmingly preferring the same zone blocking schemes in the run game. The Packers personnel was a great fit for it, as the front office had spent a decade drafting quicker undersized offensive linemen for McCarthy while Aaron Jones was basically lab-built for the system’s requirements at running back.
And this mostly worked well for a few years. The Packers offensive line deteriorated, primarily because of David Bakhtiari’s horror-show knee issues, but after the 2023 season, the Packers made an active choice to change their structure. We actually saw it started to take shape in 2023, as the Packers started to reduce their usage of outside zone in favor of pin-and-pull tosses, counter, and the like. These plays still ask for athleticism from their linemen but use an entirely different structure to open alleys for ball carriers rather than relying on horizontal displacement creating creases.
An offseason choice before the 2023 season, signing free agent Josh Jacobs and moving on from the aging Aaron Jones, forced the change in system. Jacobs lacks Jones’ natural gliding speed to make the timing of outside zone work, but excelled in the phone booth spaces you have to live in running inside zone, duo, power, and most of the “gap scheme” family. The problem was that the Packers had an outside zone offensive line for a duo running back, and they have spent the past two seasons trying to resolve that issue, with … rather poor results. The signing of Aaron Banks, the drafting of Anthony Belton, and the moving of Sean Rhyan to center all were attempts to get bigger and stronger to be able to move bodies vertically in the running game.
And the Packers’ quarterback had changed in this time as well, and he was different than his predecessor in important ways for how this all marries together. Jordan Love is very good, but he’s also very different from Aaron Rodgers. Rodgers spent his entire Packers career operating out of a heavy outside zone running game. When you pair that with play-action, you typically end up with one of two play structures. The most famous for Packers fans would be those deep half-boots, where Rodgers would sometimes end up ten yards behind his offensive line to uncork a deep ball to, most commonly, Jordy Nelson. But the most common is the stereotypical bootleg action, which effectively works as a rollout, and is often accompanied by concepts that look relatively similar to flood, usually with some sort of slide or flat option as the quick check if the edge doesn’t buy the run-action.
Running these types of actions regularly requires a pretty agile quarterback and a pretty quick arm action, both things Rodgers had in spades. Love on the other hand, has a bit of a longer delivery, a necessity given his longer arms, but he is also not as agile as Rodgers was. He has the silly body, after all. Now, Love still can run these actions, and has. It’s just not what Green Bay has gone to as much during his time under center.
The play-action builds off of gap scheme are more befitting to Love’s game. The run-action is more vertical, giving Love a more traditional dropback structure, and also allowing him to target the entirety of the field rather than cutting it down by two-thirds. This has been particularly important for him when targeting digs, crossers, and short posts, where he has thrived. These actions ask less of Love’s agility, but more of his ability to layer throws with velocity, something he excels at.
The reason I bring the play-action up is that the Packers have been stuck between two offenses all season, because the offensive line, the running backs, and the quarterback don’t line up. The offensive line is apocalyptic and has been undersized. Donovan Jennings, Jager Burton, and Jacob Monk are all, ideally, centers. Jennings apparently can’t snap, and Sean Rhyan is playing center so he’s blocking both Burton and Monk there (if Monk is an NFL player at all). The interior group has been legitimately expansion Houston Texans-level bad, but the Packers have at least taken significant steps to fix that problem in the past week, adding veterans Laken Tomlinson, Mekhi Becton, and, most importantly, former Wisconsin Badger Kevin Zietler.
What is noteworthy about these three, particularly Tomlinson and Becton, but even Zeitler at his advanced age, is that they do not fit what Green Bay was trying to run during pre-season, which was a lot of outside zone. These players are here to get vertical displacement in the running game. In the coming weeks, expect to see plenty of duo, plenty of inside zone, plenty of power, etc. And with that, you can build a play-action game that mimics the run looks and a play-action game that plays into the strengths of the quarterback.
Now, there are two massive open questions remaining. Most importantly, are these guys going to be good enough to get the Packers offensive line out of terrible to just below average? They’ll still be starting Anthony Belton, someone who should have been playing guard from the moment he was drafted, at right tackle. Zeitler, who was good last year, had off-season quad surgery, hence why he did not sign until the end of September. Becton alternates between good and terrible depending on the year. And Tomlinson was solidly below-average last year in Houston after a few mediocre years in New York. The last season of his that you could classify as good was the same year Aaron Rodgers won his final MVP. Even getting this line to just normal bad from the expansion-level atrocity they are right now will be a massive upgrade, and the veteran know-how of this group should hopefully improve upon the mess of missed assignments and bad technique in both the run and pass game the line has shown in the first three games.
The second massive question is the running backs. Marshawn Lloyd has been the worst back in the NFL. I’m not talking in EPA or success rate (he’s second-worst in EPA-per-rush and 13th-worst in success rate), I’m talking about having eyes that can see things happening on my screen. Lloyd is dead last in the NFL in rushing yards over expected, and it’s no secret as to why. He’s, by NFL running back standards, blind.
This concern is not new, as it was very prevalent at USC. He was terrible on zone runs, which ask more of his vision, and he was good on gap scheme runs, which largely pre-determine which hole to hit. Even with the scheme change, the Packers should consider finding a different player to take his roster spot, whether that is waiting for the seemingly inevitable Josh Jacobs return at some point, or cutting bait now and finding someone off a practice squad who can at least give you replacement level running back performance.
Lloyd’s primary partner, Kaleb Johnson, has been just as bad. Johnson’s RYOE per attempt is even worse than Lloyd’s, costing the Packers nearly two yards per carry! His EPA is better, simply because of Lloyd’s lost fumble and because the Packers recovered his own, but his success rate is just as porous. And Johnson’s primary issue is the same: he can’t read his blocks. Neither Lloyd nor Johnson have any capacity to run outside zone, which asks more of a running backs ability to read the moving morass than any other play-type. Even if the Packers keep giving carries to both of them, moving to a primarily gap-scheme run game, which more or less tells them exactly where to go, should help both hopefully go from the worst running back duo in the history of the franchise to just normal bad.
And this is all just taking us back to where we’ve been the last two years. A gap scheme run game behind an increasingly big offensive line (the Packers will be approximately the fifth-heaviest offensive line once Zeitler is up to speed and either Banks or Tomlinson man left guard), partnered with a more vertical play-action passing game that can appear the same to the defensive front seven. And hopefully that size and vertical displacement allows the running backs to play on easy mode and just hit the designated spots, and creates a virtuous cycle where the running game can be just good enough to make the play-action passing game a bigger threat.
And this better work. If it doesn’t, everyone might be getting fired.
