Paul Bretl | 1/10/2025
GREEN BAY, Wis. — How will the Packers’ pass rush handle Eagles’ quarterback Jalen Hurts and his mobility? Will they take a similar approach to what they did in Week 1, or choose to be more aggressive?
Rewinding back to the Packers’ season opener in Brazil against Philadelphia, Jeff Hafley wanted his pass rush to take a more controlled approach, where the emphasis was on keeping Hurts in the pocket.
In that regard, it worked. While Hurts would finish the 2024 regular season leading all quarterbacks in rush attempts, along with totaling 630 rushing yards and 14 touchdowns, in that Week 1 matchup with Green Bay, the Packers held him to only 33 yards on the ground on 13 attempts.
“I thought Week 1 our D line did a really good job of keeping him in the pocket,” said Jeff Hafley. “He didn’t rush from many yards. He didn’t escape.”
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But for every pro, there is a con. Although the Packers were able to keep Hurts in the pocket, their pass rush was unable to generate steady pressure with a more conservative–for lack of a better term–approach. As a unit, the Eagles offensive line was credited with surrendering only nine pressures the entire game, per PFF. That’s a pressure rate on Hurts of just over 23 percent–which for an offensive line, anything under 30 percent is a good day.
Even when the Packers sent some blitzes in that first matchup, which they did from both the linebacker and nickel positions, those pressures didn’t get home quick enough, and as Matt LaFleur mentioned after the game, coverages were blown on the back end in several of those instances.
The Packers wanted to make Hurts stay in the pocket and if he was going to beat them, do so with his arm–which is often what happened. Hurts was 20-of-34 passing in that game for 278 at an efficient 8.2 yards per attempt with two touchdowns to two interceptions.
So will Hafley flip the script in this rematch and try to pressure Hurts early on?
“Well, it depends how they’re going to try to attack us,” said Hafley. “Are they going to run it more, or are they going to let him start to throw it early in the game? We’ve gotta do some things differently. I think each week we’ve tried to throw some different stuff at people, and I think we need to do some of that early in the game, make him see a couple different things and throw him off a little bit.”
Not only against the Eagles in Week 1, but all season, the Packers’ pass rush has been inconsistent. By ESPN’s pass-rush win rate metric, the Packers will finish the regular season ranked 26th. In terms of pure pressure rate, they rank 16th, which in part, is a product of the manufactured pressures that Hafley has created through blitzes or simulated pressures.
Not to discount the schemed-up component behind those pressures, but that’s almost certainly going to have to be a part of the equation this week, to some degree, given the Packers’ struggles to get home with only four. And when those blitzes are dialed up, the defense is then down a defender in coverage.
Adding to the difficulty of this matchup is that awaiting the Packers’ defensive front is one of the best offensive lines in football, with the Eagles entering the postseason ranked sixth in pass-block win rate.
“They’re huge,” said Hafley of the offensive line. “They’re really well coached. They know what they’re doing. They’ve got great length, they’ve got size. They stay on their double teams. They’re good at their gap scheme runs, I think it’s a really good combination of their scheme and their players.”
To find out what can happen when a pass rush fails to drum up pressure against a high-powered offense, we only have to look back two weeks ago to when the Packers faced Minnesota. In that contest, Sam Darnold was under pressure on only 31% of his dropbacks and from a clean pocket, he completed 26-of-30 passes for 315 yards with three touchdowns. And when the Packers did attempt to blitz, they too often didn’t get home, leaving their secondary short-handed against a very good group of pass catchers.
Again rewinding back to Week 1, we saw a similar outcome for the Packers’ secondary. In that game, the dynamic duo of AJ Brown and Devonta Smith combined for 12 receptions for 203 yards and a touchdown–and that was with the Packers having Jaire Alexander at cornerback.
So this is the conundrum that the Packers’ defense will face on Sunday–try to keep Hurts in the pocket and hope that your four-man rush can get home and that you can hold up on the back end or send pressure and let the front pin its ears back, knowing that opportunities for Hurts to extend plays and go off script will exist?
To state the obvious, neither alternative will guarantee success. The first option puts the burden on what has been an inconsistent pass rush and a short-handed secondary to potentially have to hold up in coverage longer. While, on the flip side, telling the front to let it rip doesn’t mean they will get home against a stout offensive line, and it’s not as if blitzing has slowed Hurts all that much this season. According to PFF, when blitzed, Hurts is completing 64% of his throws at 7.2 yards per attempt with seven touchdowns to just one interception.
“He (Hurts) had the one scramble at the end of the game that was costly when he did get out, when we pressured, we had an open B gap to the right side,” Hafley said of Week 1. “I think I’ve watched it 100 times now. There’s got to be a little bit of both, and I think I’ve learned from that, just like I’ve learned a lot over the year.
“I think our whole staff’s learned a lot. We learned who the players are. We learned what we can do. We’ve had to evolve away from some of the things maybe that we’ve come into thinking we were going to do. And, you know, ultimately, we want to win games and keep the score down.”
There is good and bad with each approach and by no means does Hafley have to only choose one or the other–the situation can dictate what he dials up. But in order to have those opportunities where those types of decisions can be made, the Packers have to earn the right to rush the passer by containing Saquon Barkley and the running game on early downs, which is obviously a challenge of its own.
The first game of the season was now roughly four-plus months ago, which in the NFL can be a lifetime. In that timeframe teams can change and evolve drastically, and that goes not only for the Packers defense but the Eagles’ offense. So how the Packers go about defending the Eagles in the NFC Wildcard round will likely be different because of that time element, but the question in regards to how to rush Hurts is still there–Green Bay’s approach just might differ.
“It feels like so long ago,” said Hafley of Week 1, “but we did some really good things that we like, but then there’s some things where we have to do different, and there’s going to be a time and a place for when we want to go hard at ‘em and when we’ve got to keep him in the pocket. But we certainly need to play better and coach better than we did at that game, because we need to win this game.”