The Green Bay Packers offense looked in midseason form in their preseason debut. Unfortunately, that has more to do with repeating last season’s common trends.
Jordan Love and the first-team offense played just two drives and had little to show for it, thanks to drop issues that haven’t miraculously disappeared. Unfortunately, the backups also followed that trend.
The receivers weren’t the only ones whose hands let the team down, either. The offensive line committed more than a handful of holding penalties, which hindered several promising plays and prevented the offense from ever finding a groove.
It’s preseason, and the team has plenty of time to address these recurring issues before they play a meaningful game. It was clear that the New York Jets and their new head coach, Aaron Glenn, cared more about this preseason game than Matt LaFleur’s squad, and there’s no point in declaring the season over after this game that will be quickly forgotten.
Still, seeing last year’s problems on full display once again isn’t exactly encouraging. How concerning should Saturday’s drops and penalties be?
Heading up the first-team offense, Jordan Love completed just one of his five pass attempts. It’s not a good look for the third-year starter, but his receivers didn’t do him any favors.
Two of the incompletions bounced off Romeo Doubs‘s hands. Doubs faced the Jets’ top corner, Sauce Gardner, not an ideal matchup, but he should have caught his first target. The second was in tight coverage but was catchable.
Malik Heath dropped another attempt and continued to struggle catching the ball long after Love’s night was through. Israel Abanikanda, Mecole Hardman, and Julian Hicks also had drops with the backups.
While the first team offensive line held up well, the rest of the group had five holding penalties; Jacob Monk had three, while Anthony Belton and Donovan Jennings each had one. These penalties disrupted some solid runs and prevented the offense from generating momentum, resulting in a stagnant performance.
The receiving corps was without Jayden Reed and Dontayvion Wicks, the two players who struggled the most with drops in 2024, while Doubs was facing one of the league’s best young corners. The offensive linemen committing penalties were largely backups. It’s also one week into the preseason. Despite how unfun the game was to watch, it’s not the end of the world, and the sample size for the first-team offense was tiny. Still, it’s far from ideal to see these problems persist after the team’s commitment to fix them.
In the preseason, backups are getting most of the snaps, and the offensive playcalling is vanilla thanks to not preparing for individual opponents. Yet Saturday’s issues were related to fundamentals rather than game plan. Even if you’re not running your best plays, it’s a Herculean task to get anything going when your team is constantly shooting itself in the foot. You can’t build off of anything when every other play stops the game.
Matt LaFleur wasn’t happy after the game, nor should he be.
“Any time you just play with poor technique and poor fundamentals and you’re making bad decisions,” LaFleur said, “it’s hard to play the game of football.”
Like last year’s preseason trouncing at the hands of Sean Payton‘s Denver Broncos, this could serve as a wake-up call for the team, especially for those fighting for roster spots. One can’t coast into an NFL game, and it’s hard to win football games when you aren’t doing the basics.
What can Green Bay do to fix these long-standing issues? Clearly, something is getting lost in translation between the coaches’ efforts and the fundamentals on the field.
Regarding the drops, it’s worth noting that they didn’t become a major problem until former wide receivers coach Jason Vrable took the promotion to passing game coordinator, leading Ryan Mahaffey to take control of the receivers.
Still, most of the drops came from receivers who might not even be on the roster next month. And rookie Matthew Golden caught his target after his hands were praised throughout training camp. It might simply end up being those who can’t catch, won’t make the roster, and that’s fine. With Reed and Wicks out, there’s no way to see how the team’s top receivers will learn from their past mistakes.
For the offensive line, we saw more positive signs from the coaching staff. Jacob Monk might be trending the wrong way, but the first-team line looked solid, and we saw some really nice growth from Jordan Morgan and Anthony Belton (despite his holding penalty). Saturday’s issues point toward potential personnel issues rather than coaching ones.
We probably won’t see the main starters on offense again, because LaFleur will let them get their meaningful snaps from joint practices rather than exhibition games. We’ll see how the starters respond against the Detroit Lions in Week 1.
All in all, it wasn’t encouraging to see the same mistakes, but it’s far from the end of the world. How the team responds after Saturday’s poor showing will mean more in the long term than a quickly forgotten preseason game.