Paul Bretl| 11/5/2024
GREEN BAY, Wis.– Coming off a disappointing loss against the Detroit Lions, the Packers will enter their bye week at 6-3 on the year, but they’ll have to sit with their most recent mistake-filled performance for the next two weeks before they return to the field.
“I think for us, the only thing that is hard is to go on a bye after a loss, because this loss will sit with you for a long time,” said Matt LaFleur on Monday. “We’ve got a lot to think about, I would say, over the next 13 days before we play again, or until we get really into the Chicago Bears. But it is what it is. I think there’s, like I said earlier, there’s a lot of things that we all have to collectively work on, on an individual basis in order to get us to be a better football team.”
Penalties, dropped passes, a back-breaking interception and some missed tackles on defense all contributed to the sloppy performance that we saw from the Packers on Sunday. But the truly alarming part of it all was that it’s not as if this was a one-off performance.
To varying degrees, self-inflicted mistakes have been the norm this season for the Packers, but they’ve often been able to overcome them with splash plays on both sides of the ball or simply because they are playing an inferior opponent. However, against a team of Detroit’s caliber, those errors are a recipe for disaster.
“I think we’ve been, we’ve had good moments of playing good complimentary football and then we’ve had some not so great moments,” said LaFleur. “And I think some of the mistakes maybe that we’ve made the last four games that we’ve won showed up yesterday against a good football team that, it’s hard to overcome those in those moments.
“So, they played, Detroit played a clean game. When you look at it, they played a clean game, didn’t make any critical mistakes where we were, had a handful of critical mistakes that really came back to bite us.”
As LaFleur said, there have been good moments. While it can be easy to fixate on the problems–particularly when the wounds are still fresh–this is a team that is still 6-3 on the year, has been one of the best at generating explosive plays on offense and among the best at forcing takeaways on defense.
However, for a Packers team with Super Bowl aspirations, they aren’t where they need to be in that regard either. Those miscues, specifically the penalties, have been a major contributor to the inconsistent play that we’ve seen from the offensive side of the ball this season.
Through nine games, this is a very boom-or-bust Green Bay offense, able to score as quickly as anyone, but it’s a group that also struggles to sustain drives with the aforementioned penalties or dropped passes or off-target throws or whatever it may be, putting the offense behind the sticks and in predictable passing situations, which for any unit can be difficult to overcome on a regular basis.
When it comes to the question, ‘how do the Packers find more consistency?’ we know the answer is fewer penalties and overall better execution to limit mistakes. But the calculus, or the solution to get to that answer, is what eludes this team. Everything just described has been an issue for much of the season, but it hasn’t improved.
“I think it’s just trying to do too much,” said Sean Rhyan after Sunday’s loss. “We were talking about you can’t make big plays, you just gotta do your job. I think it kind of happened today, just trying to do too much. I think we just gotta, when we are out there, relax a little bit, know that we’re good enough to take on whoever and execute.”
Unlike in the last two seasons where the Packers’ bye has come either very late in the season or early on, this year’s is right in the middle. While it will provide LaFleur, the coaching staff, and players the opportunity to take a step back and reflect on what has been up to this point in the season, the self-scouting component that is synonymous with the bye week from the outside is a bit “overblown,” says LaFleur. Week-to-week in-season, the Packers are always on top of that process.
However, without having to gameplan for a specific opponent this week, the additional time does provide the coaches and players with the opportunity to be hyper-intentional about one area that they can improve upon. The key to making that a worthwhile endeavor is making sure that the work done this week in that regard is then applied next week when the team is back together and on the practice field.
“I think it’s just, one of the things our staff is doing with each individual today (Monday) is, there’s got to be a focus on one thing that we can all improve upon because all of us can improve in some area,” LaFleur said. “So, that’s the focus today and I wanted our guys to know that leaving the building today so that when they come back on Monday, not only can they work on it over, on their own for the next six days, or whatever. But when we get back and have practice next Monday, that there’s got to be an intentionality behind that.”
No team wants to enter the bye week on a loss, but to state the obvious, at the halfway point of this season compared to last, the Packers are in a much different spot. Although the opportunities for improvement this season aren’t nearly as stark as what they were in 2023, this is a team that did have a pretty spectacular turnaround a year ago, and from a process standpoint, at least, the coaches can draw on those experiences to help the 2024 Packers find a second-half spark.
“I think that’s kind of one of the things we’re going to talk about as a staff,” added LaFleur, “is just some of the things we did the back half of the season to allow us to develop and continue to get better. And I think a lot of it just started with our approach to practice, how much competition we had in practice. I thought it made practices have more energy and I thought it reflected in our play quite frankly.”