Paul Bretl | 10/22/2024
GREEN BAY, Wis. — The Packers’ defense had the difficult task this past Sunday of having to contain CJ Stroud and the Houston Texans’ passing game. It was a challenge that they met with an aggressive and ever-evolving play-style.
“I thought overall,” Matt LaFleur said on Monday, “I thought our defense for the most part – there were a couple of plays where Mixon got loose on us and then there was one play where we didn’t carry the special, the deep over route that was an explosive play – but I thought for the most part our defense played as well as they had all season long.”
Stroud would finish the game completing just 10-of-21 passes for 86 yards with no touchdowns and just 4.1 yards per pass attempt. The number of completions, the completion rate, passing yards, and yards per attempt were all season-lows for Stroud–and it wasn’t particularly close.
Green Bay’s success on defense began with getting pressure on the quarterback. The Packers were able to pressure Stroud on a hefty 51.7 percent of his dropbacks in Sunday’s win, according to The Athletic’s Matt Schneidman. For some context, the highest team pressure rate in the NFL this season is 42.6 percent.
Obviously, pressure is a good thing. It disrupts the timing and rhythm of the play and can lead to off-target throws and mistakes. But the Packers’ success didn’t lie only in the fact that they were able to disrupt Stroud. Equally as important was how they did it.
Throughout the season, the Packers have struggled to generate consistent pressure with just a four man rush. To combat this, defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley would send blitzes in key moments, such as on third downs. On Houston’s 15 third down attempts in this game, the Packers blitzed on a whopping 10 of them.
What we are seeing is a defense that’s doing the dictating. Of course, that aggressive approach isn’t always going to workout, but when there is the opportunity to get off the field on third down, Hafley isn’t sitting back–he’s forcing the issue with an attacking play-style.
“Little splash here, little splash there, mixing it up,” said Rashan Gary at his locker after the game. “Understanding our personnel, understanding how people want to block our personnel and just keep adding to the packages and things like that.”
The Packers will enter Week 8 ranked 25th in blitz rate this season–so it’s not as if Hafley is sending pressure on every dropback. However, what Hafley does have is an extremely good intuition of when to rush four and when to send some extra help based on the situation and the game-flow.
Contributing to the chaos is Hafley’s ability to disguise where these blitzes are coming from. He will also send multiple blitzers and ask them to run stunts, as we saw on Sunday, along with some truly diabolical play-calls where the Packers end up rushing only four, which includes still sending a linebacker but dropping a defensive lineman into the middle of the field.
“A lot of what we call replacement fire zones,” said Matt LaFleur on Monday. “Yeah, he did a nice job of mixing up the coverage behind those pressures and I mean, shoot, we had multiple times we had free runners at the quarterback.”
It’s been a relatively quiet start to the season for Packers’ defensive end Rashan Gary, who entered Sunday’s game with only nine pressures in six games. His pass rush win rate coming into Week 7 was at only 2.9 percent, according to PFF. Last season it was at 16.0 percent.
Not helping matters is how often Gary is chipped but at the end of the day, the Packers need their top pass rusher to produce as such. To help, Hafley moved Gary around often in Sunday’s game against Houston. One example came with the Texans in the red zone on their opening offensive possession. Rather than bull-rushing off the edge as he often does, Gary was standing up over the center and rushed from the middle of the field, able to pressure Stroud.
Gary would end up finishing the day with a season-high six pressures–his previous best was three-and came away with his first sack since Week 1.
“Well it presents a lot of challenges in regards to just who are you gonna put on him and how do you get him blocked,” said LaFleur on Monday. “And what are the — typically what happens when you have somebody that’s hovering around in there, there’s gonna be some sort of pick game or something coming off of that. It’s not just gonna be usually just a straight rush, so it just depends on what people are doing in those situations.”
We’ve often discussed the illusion of complexity on the offensive side of the football. This is a phrase that LaFleur brought to Green Bay and references the offense’s ability to disguise looks and run similar concepts that build off of each other over the course of the game.
In short, this can cause havoc for a defense. When there are a variety of plays that can be run from just a few personnel groupings or plays that look the same but end up quite different, it causes confusion. Well, right now, we are seeing that same effect take place on the defensive side of the ball with Hafley at the helm.
Whether it be through timely blitzes, disguising coverages, or moving players around, everything from the defensive front to the back end is married up and working in unison. The pass rush, gap assignments, coverage–it all works as one cohesive unit. Making matters more challenging for opposing offenses is the number of players that this defense relies on and the versatility they have across the field, giving Hafley the ultimate flexibility when it comes to game-planning.
“I just thought he’s done a hell of a job, I really do,” LaFleur said. “I think it’s not just him, it’s everybody, right, our whole defensive staff but ultimately somebody’s got to put the plan together and call it. I thought considering all the circumstances – a really explosive offense, you had two drives start on the 11-yard line, another drive start on the 45-yard line – there’s just a lot of short fields in there. To be able to hold somebody to 22 points considering all those circumstances, I thought he was deserving of the game ball.”
Adapt and evolve. Those are words or themes that often come up on Thursdays when we get the opportunity to speak with Hafley. Like any defense, there are core principles that make up what Hafley’s system is, but how those concepts are going to be leveraged each week is extremely fluid with a number of variables dictating the game-plan and in-game play-calls.
As Hafley told us recently, this isn’t a plug-and-play playbook; it is always evolving.
“I also think that as we go and we evolve within our scheme, I think we’re starting to get a really good feel for that,” said Hafley last Thursday. “I think it’s about adapting. I’ve said this since I got here, it’s not like, ‘Hey, here’s the playbook. This is in. Go run the defense.’ It’s each week, what did we look like? What do we look like when they watch us on tape? What can we do a little bit different to counter that? What do we do really well? Let’s do more of it, make it look different.
“And then as we start to see certain players do certain things, how can we best use them to improve? We have to keep getting better. That’s the whole key to this whole entire thing as we go. Any way that we can adapt and get better, both coaching, playing, scheme, personnel, it’s not just like plug and play. Let’s evolve. I think that’s very important.”