The Packers Have the Look of an NFL Champion
12 weeks into the NFL season, a clear-cut favorite for the Super Bowl has yet to emerge. Multiple teams have shown flashes of brilliance, but each and every one of them have question marks attached to their resume.
Some Aaron Rodgers offseason drama meant the Packers entered the season with more questions than most, and an absolute no-show in week 1 against New Orleans didn’t do much to quiet the skeptics. However, from week 2 onwards the Packers have looked like one of the best teams in the entire NFL.
They currently possess the 2nd best record in the NFC, and they already own tiebreakers over Arizona and Los Angeles which could be extremely valuable when it comes to playoff seeding.
But what have they done to get here?
For starters, the defense has notably improved since last year. Despite key injuries to guys like Jaire Alexander and Za’Darius Smith (arguably Green Bay’s two best defenders), the Packers’ defense has gone from allowing the 13th fewest points per game in 2020 (23.1) to the 5th fewest in 2021 (20.2).
The defensive improvement has been a welcome change in Green Bay, but as long as Aaron Rodgers is in town, this team is always going to be centered around a dominant offense. Rodgers has played lights out football this year, and he has the Packers’ offense playing at the 5th most efficient rate in the league.
The way Green Bay is playing this year has been a masterclass in offensive philosophy, and the multitude of ways they can dice up an opposing defense has them looking like a team ready to win a championship in 2021.
When Matt LaFleur took the Packers head coaching job in 2019, he knew he was stepping into a favorable situation. The Packers are one of the more storied franchises in the NFL, and he was getting an opportunity to work with Rodgers — a Super Bowl champion quarterback with two MVP awards under his belt.
Working with a quarterback of Rodgers’ caliber was surely going to boost the odds of success for Green Bay’s new head coach, but the pairing didn’t come without its fair share of challenges.
Rodgers had 14 NFL seasons of NFL experience before LaFleur’s arrival, and all but one of those seasons were with the same head coach — Mike McCarthy.
Under McCarthy, Rodgers was given a ton of creative freedom where he served as the focal point of one of the pass happiest offenses in the NFL. Rodgers’ new coach — who also happens to be the team’s playcaller — approaches the game quite differently from a stylistic perspective.
This shift reportedly led to a bit of tension between Rodgers and LaFleur initially. The quarterback wanted the offense to continue running through him as it had for over a decade, but the first-year head coach had other intentions.
LaFleur rose through the NFL ranks via the famous Shanahan coaching tree, and much of his offensive philosophy closely mirrors that of his esteemed mentors. One of the trademarks of the Shanahan offense (which LaFleur runs a variation of) is establishing the run game as the foundation of the offense, and then building the passing game off of it.
Almost any offense LaFleur has been a part of has found a way to get a 1,000-yard season out of one of their backs. Whether it’s a previously unheralded guy (think Alfred Morris in Washington or Devonta Freeman in Atlanta), or a bonafide stud who the entire offense runs through (think Todd Gurley in LA or Derrick Henry in Tennessee), there’s always been production on the ground in the offenses LaFleur has been around.
It didn’t take long for this newfound offensive philosophy to make its presence felt in Green Bay either.
In LaFleur’s first year on the job, third-year running back Aaron Jones experienced his first 1,000-yard season, and he hit that mark again in 2020 before earning himself a lucrative second contract.
This extension came as a bit of a surprise in a league where investing heavily in running backs has been largely avoided in recent years. To make things even more surprising, this move came just one season after the Packers invested a 2nd round draft pick in AJ Dillon — a bruising 250 lb back who’s also become a key cog in this offense.
Investing in the running back position and the run game in general has paid off well for LaFleur and the Packers though. Under LaFleur’s lead, Green Bay has posted an extremely impressive 36–9 (80.0%) regular-season record in his three years with the team.
One of the bigger stories of the NFL this season has been how defenses have slowed down some of the league’s highest-octane offenses.
We saw Mahomes and the Chiefs go through a funk early in the year, Josh Allen and the Bills seem to have fallen back down to earth from their 2020 highs, and Matt Stafford and the Rams are currently slumping after an electric start to their season.
Meanwhile, the Packers have seemingly been immune to these offensive droughts.
Their balanced attack means there’s no one thing you can take away from this group to slow them down, and the result has been an offense that’s virtually impossible to stop.
The best offenses in the NFL are those who can beat you in a myriad of ways, and this year the Packers have shown they’re capable of doing exactly that. Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams still headline one of the scariest passing attacks in the league, but the increased emphasis on the run game has turned this offense into a true pick your poison for opposing defenses.
After butting heads initially, Rodgers and LaFleur have become one of the best head coach and quarterback duos in the entire NFL. The marriage of LaFleur’s scheme with Rodgers’ wizard-like skills as a passer has turned this offense into a Swiss Army Knife capable of overcoming any obstacles a defense may present.
This is a Packers offense that’s built to win a Super Bowl, and if they continue playing like they have throughout the first half of the season, they might just do it.
