Christian Watson isn’t a particularly difficult player to understand. He’s big, he’s fast, and he actually has become a reliable catcher of the football after some rookie scuffles in that department. Metric
after metric shows how important he has been, for years, in helping the Green Bay Packers beat man coverage. When he went out with an ACL injury against the Chicago Bears last January, it felt like that drew the curtains on any real playoff run Green Bay could have made. He’s so vital, particularly against the best teams, to what Green Bay wants to do down the field. But he’s also important in the more conservative parts of the playbook as well, which were on display on Sunday.
Let’s start with the simplest of them all. Tucker Kraft had an absolutely monstrous game on National Tight Ends Day, and a major part of that was the selfless effort of Christian Watson.
There’s nothing fancy in design here. This is just a stick concept from a condensed split, and Love reads Kraft wide open in the flat. Kraft them rumbles and bumbles for a big gain. Part of the reason Mr. YAC and Cheese is able to rumble and bumble for said big gain is that Watson gives an airplane block to the trailing defender, who might have had a chance to either trip Kraft up or knock him out of bounds. It isn’t much, but that little bump shields Kraft and lets him pick up speed to beat the trailing defenders for a big gain.
Next is another assist for Watson, this time on a Tucker Kraft touchdown.
This is just a simple little RPO, and Green Bay does a good job putting their two best blocking receivers out to clear the path for Kraft. It’s basically a walk-in touchdown because both Malik Heath and Christian Watson do their jobs here. The job isn’t complicated, but it’s well-executed. Watson runs the press corner off, and then throttles down and keeps Joey Porter Jr from having any real impact on the play. It isn’t a pancake block, it isn’t mashing down a defensive end, but it’s the kind of stuff that makes the easy layup throws really work.
Watson’s ability to block in space may be the best of any wide receiver in football, and it really opens up Green Bay’s RPO playbook. The other receivers on the roster, sans Malik Heath, are solid blockers at best. Romeo Doubs and Dontayvion Wicks give good effort, but they have gotten teammates lit up a couple times this year due to mistiming their engagement. Meanwhile, Matthew Golden, Bo Melton, and Jayden Reed are too undersized to be impactful blockers, despite their best efforts. It’s a lot easier to call and execute these plays to move the chains, and ultimately score, when you can reliably count on your perimeter blockers to win their assignments, setting up advantageous situations for the ball-carriers.
The last one here is more on the mashing side of things.
Josh Jacobs makes this play by making the corner miss, but Watson sets up the one-on-one by mashing safety Chuck Clark down out of the play. Remember, there is no block in the back in the tackle box, so this is a legal block. Few, if any, offenses like to use their wide receivers as insert blockers more than Green Bay does, and no one on the team does it better than Christian Watson.
Here he just takes on a safety, but he has routinely been asked to block edge defenders. The ability for him to fulfill that role regularly, and the significant improvement he provides over someone like Matthew Golden in that role (no offense to Golden, but he’s 190 pounds) can help open up a running game that has been stuck in neutral for much of the season. Off of this, it becomes easier to build out play-action shot plays when you have personnel groupings the defense has to respect more when keeping the ball on the ground.
