Paul Bretl | 9/3/2024
GREEN BAY, Wis. — The new look Packers’ defense under defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley is going to be put to the test right away against a Philadelphia Eagles’ offense that packs a lot of fire power in their backfield.
Under center is quarterback Jalen Hurts, who on his own, rushed for 602 yards in 2023. But joining him is former New York Giants’ running back Saquon Barkley, along with Kenneth Gainwell.
“It’s like I said a few years ago when we were playing Russ (Wilson), Jalen is like the fastest chicken in the yard with no fence. It’s going to be hard to contain him, but it’s the task we’ve set out to do,” said Preston Smith. “We gotta make sure we don’t let him get comfortable and don’t let him have a big game again.”
Barkley has rushed for nearly 2,300 yards combined over the last two seasons. Former teammate Xavier McKinney noted Barkley’s dynamic ability with the ball and that he can do pretty much everything you would want a running back to do. Gainwell, meanwhile, would average 4.3 yards per carry with the Eagles in 2023, and the offense as a whole–pre-Barkley–ranked ninth in rushing yards per game in 2023.
Beyond the dynamic playmaking abilities that the Eagles’ backfield boasts, of course contributing to their success is a very stout offensive line, one that Matt LaFleur believes has consistently been the best in football over the last several years.
“I think Philly over the course of the year, especially in the last handful of years, five years or so, have had one of the best offensive lines in the game of football,” said LaFleur on Monday. “And I know they obviously, losing Kelce is a, that’s a tough guy to replace. But they’re just, they had five guys that can start on most teams. So it’s going to be a good challenge for our defense for sure.”
A key element in Hafley’s potential turnaround of this Packers’ defense will be improved play against the run. Last season, the Packers allowed 4.5 yards per carry on the year–the eighth-highest rate in football–and four games of 200-plus yards on the ground by an opponent–the most in football.
Finding a way to slow an opponent’s running game does wonders for the rest of the defense. It puts the offense in long down-and-distances and therefore predictable passing situations, where the pass rush can pin its ears back and the secondary has the advantage a the coverage standpoint.
We’ve heard a lot this offseason about the attacking, get off the ball and go get the quarterback play-style that the defense will have under Hafley. In the team’s joint practice with the Baltimore Ravens, we saw the havoc that can have on the quarterback in the passing game, but how does that play-style fare against the run?
No defensive scheme is perfect, otherwise every team would be running the same style of defense. There are pros and cons to every system. In theory, the potential downside of getting upfield as quickly as possible can create running lanes for an offense to exploit or opportunities to get to the boundary.
To counter this, gap integrity will, as always, remain crucial, along with the ability to flow with the gap as it moves. In addition to that, the play of the defenders at the second level to fill any gaps that do appear will be paramount as well.
“Typically what we’re trying to do is get guys in the backfield to own their gap through their man,” said defensive line coach Jason Rebrovich. “So if they’re aligned as 3-technique on the outside part of the guard, it’s his job as you go through the outside part of that guard and own the B-gap in between the outside part of the guard and the inside part of the tackle.
“So wherever that gap moves he’s gotta move a along it and then that allows the guys behind it to obviously scrape, get over top, get downhill, and fill the gaps that they have to fill.”
An added wrinkle that the Packers will also have to contend with–and this goes both ways with Hafley in his first season as defensive coordinator–is that the Eagles have a new offensive coordinator in Kellen Moore, and therefore a new offense, with relatively little tape to study since no regular season games have been played. How exactly the Eagles will want to attack this Packers’ defense in the run game is even less clear than what it normally might be.
“It’s always tough,” said Smith of the unscouted looks, “because I think they’ve got a new coordinator with Kellen Moore, and they’re going to come out with some different plays and maybe a different system to what they’ve been running. A lot of plays we’ve seen on film they run from last year they like to run. We know this year there’s going to be some looks we haven’t seen. We just have to stay together, play our technique, and make sure that we execute at a high level and do our job to the best of our ability.
“It’s never going to be a game where everything goes the way you want it to go. But we have to make sure that the plays that we do have an opportunity to make, that we make those plays, and when we see unscouted looks we adjust properly.”
In addition to the Eagles’ playmaking abilities in the run game, they have plenty of talent in the passing game as well. At receiver is the dynamic duo of AJ Brown and DeVonta Smith. The two combined for 187 receptions in 2023 and over 2,500 receiving yards. Also not to be forgotten about is tight end Dallas Goedert, who has averaged almost 600 receiving yards per year over his six NFL seasons.
Truly stopping the Eagles’ run game probably isn’t a realistic expectation for the Packers, or any defense for that matter. But finding a way to slow them down feels like a near must. If the Packers are unable to do that, and the Eagles can marry the run and passing games together, finding any sort of success defensively becomes a much more challenging task.
“I feel like we’ve got a great run scheme, great defensive front and great coaches,” added Smith. “The scheme we got is pretty great to help us stop the run. We just gotta go out there and showcase it. You can work on things all year long, and if you don’t showcase it, if you don’t play it right, then it’s not going to actually show what you’ve been working on. So I think this first game it’s going to show us what we’ve been working on, show our keys and show how great of a run defense we can be.”