The Green Bay Packers need to throw the ball more, but that’s on Matt LaFleur, not on Jordan Love

The Green Bay Packers need to throw the ball more, but that’s on Matt LaFleur, not on Jordan Love

The Green Bay Packers have become reliant on the run game. Maybe too reliant, but it’s not a reflection of the way the team feels about Jordan Love. This is so much more about Matt Laflur. You are Locked on Packers, your daily Green Bay Packers podcast, part of the Locked On podcast network. Your team every day. [Music] You are locked on Packers, part of the Locked on Podcast Network, your team every day. I’m Peter Bowski and I cover the Packers for the Leap, a newsletter I would love for you to subscribe to. Follow me on Twitter, Peter_Bukowski. Follow the podcast on Twitter, locked on Packers. Like us on Facebook, subscribe to the podcast, iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, wherever you find podcasts, you will find Locked on Packers, the number one Packers podcast on the internet and the show for fans who know what happened. They want to know why and how. Today’s episode brought to you by our friends at Monarch Money. Take control of your finances with Monarch Money. Use code lockdown NFL at monarchmoney.com for 50% off your first year. There were questions, including on this show last year, about the runheaviness of the Green Bay Packers. They ended up last, and I mean last in the NFL in neutral pass rate. neutral pass rate is early downs because on third down on third and eight you really have no choice. You have to throw the ball. Um and when the game is still in the balance the the default settings for the the stats that I use are a someone one of the teams has a win percentage between 20 and 80%. Which I guess would mean the other team has to as well. So the game is still relatively in the balance. Once you get on beyond 90%, your chances of winning the games are pretty small. It’s not zero, but in all likelihood, you are throwing the ball in those cases. And in if you’re trying to catch up, and if you’re winning, you’re you’re probably running the ball. And if we just had that information and the information that last year the Packers had an elite run game, and they did an injured quarterback twice, twice injured, and that in the second half of the season, they went through a stretch of games where they were blowing teams out. I think that would tell us a lot because number one, you blow a team out, that shortens your sample size. But if you look like I was trying to find a representative sample. I was trying to find like can I go through and find a a set of games a a stretch of more than you know four games where the Packers were normal where it felt like okay this is this is the version of the team that really is is consistent yeartoyear down to down isn’t relying on Jordan love isn’t relying on situation in terms of the health and there really isn’t because you’ve got the Eagles game I continue to believe he was hurt in that game. Anyway, you have the Malik Willis set of games. He comes back against the Vikings, is hurt very clearly, and then that game is immediately a blowout. You’re getting like eight eight sample plays in that game. Then there’s three games, the Rams, the Cardinals, and the Texans. Um, by the way, the Packers win all of those games and Jordan Love looks pretty good in all of them, and then gets hurt again against Jacksonville, plays very clearly hurt against Detroit, has the by-week. This is when he starts to look healthy. But then you’ve got a Lions game or excuse me, a Bears game, two blowouts, the 49ers and and the Dolphins. You sandwich in there a Detroit game where your offense no shows in the first half and you basically have to throw out the whole second half. Probably did not have a win percentage above 20% in the second half of that game until the very end maybe. And you’re definitely going to be throwing in those situations. But then they blow out the Seahawks. They blow out the Saints with a backup quarterback. I’m not sure. They had a win percentage below 80 after like the sec the first half or the first quarter against the Saints. So, how much of the season really tells us very much about the Green Bay Packers? I bring this up because bootleg football Coleman used this as an excuse to say, “I don’t think the Packers believe in Jordan Love.” Now, I don’t I don’t think we have to make it that complicated. I really don’t. a team with an elite run game, an elite run game, and a coach that likes to run the ball. Like I don’t Matt Laflur is not like Kevin Oonnell where if he had his brothers, he would, you know, throw the ball 50 times a game. I think that’s what Kevin Oonnell wants to be if he could be. I don’t think that’s what Matt Laflur wants to do. He said multiple times on the record, we like to establish the run game in a physical way. We think it sets the tone for our offense. He is the coach that knows you don’t need to run the ball effectively to have good play action. and yet wants to run the ball effectively to set up play action. There is a little bit of old school in Matt Laflur even though he is a young coach. You know, the youthful look, all that stuff. This is about Matt Laflur, not Jordan Love because it’s not like on third and eight they’re they’re throwing short of the sticks, they’re running receiver screens. That to me is a bigger indication of what you’re going to let the quarterback do on third and eight. Are you letting the quarterback play football? And if you look at average depth of target and if you look at things like third down um distance to the sticks, Jordan Love is among league leaders, they were asking him, nay, demanding of him to throw the ball down the field and he led the league in 20 plus yard plays last year. So that is where I would look. Not are they running the ball a lot when he’s hurt and when you have these when you have leads and when you have a coach who has at times leaned a little conservative. In fact, I went back and checked over the course of Matt Laflur’s tenure in Green Bay. His neutral pass rate has fallen relative to the league. So, his standing in the league has fallen every single season he has been the head coach. fifth in 2019, 10th and 11th in MVP in MVP seasons. They had neutral pass rates 10th and 11th. Like th those are high, but they’re I guess they’re above average, but they’re not when you look at them on like the the plots, they’re not anywhere near the top of the league. Like you guys see the top of the league. Those guys are are throwing the ball 65 70% of the time in neutral situations. That’s like late career Mike McCarthy stuff. Matt Laflur has never really wanted to be that. And in 2022 with Aaron Rogers coming off backtoback MVP MVP seasons. I’m I’m so excited. I’m getting ahead of myself. I can’t speak with Aaron Rogers coming off back-to-back MVP seasons. We’re leaving it in. They had a neutral pass rate that was 17th in the league in Jordan Love’s first year as a starter. They were 20th. first year as a starter with rookies everywhere with first year everythings and they had essentially the same pass rate relative to their peers in neutral situations. Remember too, Jordan Love missed half of the Jaguars game and missed half the Bears game last year in addition to the, you know, the two weeks he fully missed and then the how many weeks he played hurt. This this is trying to find a narrative when it is so much more easy to this is AAM’s razor. The simplest solution is these circumstances led them here because we know those things are true. Like let’s take the facts in evidence. We don’t know other than some circumstantial evidence what the Packers think of Jordan Love. Though I think $50 million a year gives us a pretty good indication. throwing past the six on third down consistently is a pretty good indication. Having him throw deep more than anyone in the league is a pretty good indication, but the facts and evidence are elite run game hurt all year and then some weird circumstances during the season where they’re blowing these teams out or they’re getting blown out and there’s just not a big sample size to draw from here. Aams Razer says that’s a good enough reason, but the Matt Laflur piece of this is real. I would like to see him be more aggressive, especially on early downs. And in fact, one thing I think Mr. Coleman missed in his analysis, there were a lot of stats in the piece, and you know, he he uses stats effectively to make his case at times, but the Packers play action usage, that’s not what they were last year. This was not a turn your back to the defense. This was a heavy RPO team. You’re relying on Jordan Love to make decisions. We talked about this a week or two ago. A lot of that and it’s a lot of pre- snap RPO. You decide based on the box, run or pass. Well, you’re asking Jordan Love to make those calls and teams were saying we’re going to the two high shells. It’s still the biggest thing every team does. And so if you’re going to play two high safeties against Green Bay, they are going to take the found money. And I have to say like as much as I am analytically inclined on this and I’d like to see them especially play action on early Downs. I wrote about this last year for the Leap Everyday will remember we talked about this a ton last year. I just thought that that there was some easy buttons they weren’t pressing. And I I firmly believe that part of the reason they didn’t is the health. I think Matt Laflur needs to be more aggressive throwing the ball on early downs. I said it in 2019. They did it. I said it in 2020. Even when they when Aaron Rogers was the MVP and the offense was killing people. I said it in 2021 for sure. I know I said it in 2022 and we definitely said it the two last years with Jordan Love. I wanted to see more early downplay action. This is not one season. This is not the the Packers re Matt Laflur realizing, oh no, we can’t really cook with this guy. No, no, it’s just not the reality. Now, the Packers are paying Jordan Love a lot of money and they do have some roster decisions to be made. What they have to avoid is what is happening right now in Cincinnati. I want to talk about that next on Locked on Packers. Ever wish managing your money felt easier? With Monarch Money, it can. Whether you’re growing your savings or planning a big purchase, Monarch puts you in the driver’s seat. It’s like having your own personal CFO, giving you full visibility and control over your finances. Monarch Money is more than a budgeting app. It’s a complete financial command center. You can track all your accounts, investments, and spending in one place. 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Please visit the RUED website for full safety information. What’s going on in Cincinnati right now is a warning to every team in the league, including the Packers, including and especially the Packers because they are paying Jordan Love $50 million. The Bengals are paying Joe Burrow $50 million. And what never made sense to me is why you would pay then Jamar Chase $40 million and T. Higgins $25 million. know the Tiggins deal is kind of better than I thought it was on on first blush, but the reason you’re paying Joe Burrow that much money is so that he can elevate some of the secondary pieces. And the reason you’re paying Jamar Chase all that money is because he can be your offense independent of almost anything else. And that those two guys together are force multipliers. And the reason you pay someone like Trey Hendrickson is because he is the engine of a defense that is championship caliber. Except by paying T. Higgins, you’re proving that the first two pieces of that offensive part are not true. And we know without paying Trey Hendrickson, the Bengals defense is terrible. It’s bad. So imagine if you go back to 2020, the Packers are paying Aaron Rogers at the top of the market. They’re paying David Bakiari at the top of the market. They’re paying Jer Alexander at the top of the market. And they they held out they shelled out bigname free agent signings to Zidius Smith, not at the top of the market. But had Devonte Adams, they could have given Devonte Adams a top of the market deal after 2021. Those teams were 13- win teams, the number one and number two seeds in the NFL. They were NFC championship teams. They were teams that were, if those core guys had stayed healthy, good enough to win a Super Bowl. The problem was not that they waited too long on Joe Burrow or waited too long on Jamar Chase or T. Higgins or Trey Hendrickson. Though clearly with in the case of Trey Anderson, they did. The mistake they made was believing that their team a year ago was good enough to compete. That that defense was just never going to be good enough. The offensive infrastructure is great, but clearly not good enough to overcome the defensive flaws. They had an opportunity this off seasonason to reset, trade T. Higgins, get some draft capital, add some young cheap pieces, and then use that money to sign an interior offensive lineman, a defensive player, and maybe allocate some of those resources to Trey Hendrickson and build this back. Or sign T. Higgins, take all of your off season and spend that whatever capital you have on defense and trade Trey Hendrickson. allocating 30, 35, $40 million to Trey Hendrickson, which is what the Bengals are seemingly going to do on a defense that could not stop me and my 10 closest friends is horrible team building. If it were me, I would have traded T. Higgins a year ago knowing that I want to pay Jamar Chase. I’m already paying Joe Burrow. That has to be my offensive core, my offensive identity. And if I’m going to allocate resources on offense somewhere else, it should be at offensive line and or running back, maybe, maybe tight end. It can’t be a second wide receiver. That just doesn’t make sense. It’s never made sense. And if I’m going to pay a defensive player at or near the top of the market, it better be because my defense is good enough to help me win a Super Bowl. Why am I bringing this up relative to the Packers? Well, they are paying Jordan Love at the top of the market. He is making $50 million. They just paid Zack Tom now. Not top top of the market, but $22 million is near the top of the market. Joe Burrow no longer at the top of the market, right? So, when they paid Joe Burrow, it was at the top. Two years later, it’s not. You’re paying Rashan Gary not at the top of the market, but in the top 10 of the market. Okay, a year from now, there’s going to be questions about the cost of Tucker Craft, the cost of Jaden Reed, the cost of a Romeo Dobs or a Dantavian Wix. Romeo Dobs will be heading into free agency. Can they afford to keep Christian Watson? What’s the price on Devonte Wyatt or Quay Walker? Devonte Wyatt will be under contract. This is a warning. You have to get the balance of these things right. And so if if you’re going to pay them, and you’re not going to have to pay Jaden Reed or Tuck at the top of the market, but they’re going to cost real money. It’s g it’s going to be expensive to keep those guys if they’re as good as you think they are, as good as you hope they are. If you want to get to where you want to get to this year and Tucker Craft takes a step forward, that’s going to cost a lot of money next off season. If Jaden Reed takes a step forward that you hope he does and he gets closer to say I’m on Ral St. Brown as a slot player, he’s going to cost a lot of money. You hope he does that, but it’s going to cost a lot of money. You better be more than just a wild card team if you’re going to do that though. That’s why this is important. That’s why I’m bringing this up because if you don’t space these things out right, if the balance of your team is not right, if you don’t have the young players, the cheap players to come in like they’re lucky they have got Evan Williams for for two more years at least wrapped up for cheap. Same with Edin Cooper. Same with Jordan Morgan. Same with Anthony Belton. Same with Matthew Golden. Same with Savon Williams. Those guys, you get three years with the with the draft picks now before you have to start thinking about contracts. You need those players to be good. The reason things fell apart for Cincinnati is they just had bad draft after bad draft. They couldn’t backfill the talent and all of a sudden your defense is bereft. Your offense is still good but fragile because it’s so reliant on three players. And now you’re looking around going, “Even if we resign Trey Hendrickson for for a a deal, even if you resign him for $30 million a year, what are you, the eighth best team in the AFC?” Now, I don’t think the Packers, you know, as they stand today or at the end of this season, we’ll be looking around going, “Are we the eighth best team in the AFC or in the NFC?” Certainly not the AFC. But these things can flip in a hurry. So, you have to be cognizant of these things. Now, the Bengals failures could be to the benefit of the Packers. We’ll talk about that to close out lockdown Packers. This episode is presented by Yahoo Fantasy and Fantasy Football is so back. Fire up the group chats. Get your draft boards ready. Buckle up for a season filled with breakouts, busts, overreactions. It’s all going down on Yahoo Fantasy, the place where I have played Yahoo Yah like fantasy football my whole life. Yahoo Fantasy is fantasy football to me. Right now, I’m playing fantasy football on Yahoo, and you should be, too. Whether you’re a first-timer or a veteran, making your millionth league. To celebrate 28 years of fantasy greatness, Yahoo Fantasy is dropping 28 big new features over 28 days, giving you more ways to play, more ways to draft, and more ways to win. It all begins August 4th. Stay tuned and get started by creating or joining a fantasy football league with Yahoo at yahoo fantasy.com/lockton NFL. That’s yahoo fantasy.com/lockton NFL. And let’s make this fantasy season the best one yet. The Green Bay Packers set up Zack Tom’s salary so that in 2025 he’s not going to cost very much on the ca cap at all. Um base salary is going to be 1.206 to 06 million in 2025 according to Tom Silverstein. Cap number 7.4 million. That means the Packers have $31 million under the cap. And what Tom adds is plenty of room to do another extension or two or be a player in acquiring a veteran through trade. Now, Tom Silverstein has been covering the Green Bay Packers for a long time. He knows they don’t make trades. That makes this interesting to me. This feels like, and we’ve talked about this a lot over the years here at Locked Down Packers. I’ve talked about it a lot offline with our pal Jason Hershorn, America’s guest, my co-founder of the leap. Is he is he reporting without reporting? Is he doing the thing that that beat writers, sometimes local podcast hosts, myself included, do when you have a little information. It’s not the kind of information you really report, but you suggest something might happen or could happen because you know there’s a chance it would happen. This this feels like that. Sometimes you just speculate. Tom is not one of those guys that just speculates a lot. Not like it’s never happened, but this is specific because it is suggesting a thing that could happen that has never happened or that very rarely actually happens. So that that perks my antenna a little bit. Now, there is nothing unique about what the Packers are doing with Zack Tom’s salary. So from that standpoint, it’s not like, oh, well, they’re doing this thing in this instance and that tells us XY. No, this is what they always do with these big extensions. It is itty bitty number in the first year on base salary because you’re going to get that that um, you know, guaranteed money which you can spread across the years of the deal. And so that allows it to to really have just like this tiny number, $30 million, which basically gets to spread over five years because it’s a four-year extension on top of this year, but you get to start the count the clock on the 30 now. So it’s 1.2. Then you you add the six in there, six and change, so it’s 7.4. That’s the mob accounting of NFL salary caps. I know that’s confusing, but go with it. Um, they could have they could have taken more. They have the money and they are much less flexible next year. They have some cap crunches next year. They have to make some decisions next year. That’s why we’ve talked about and that’s why Elton Jenkins is holding out. Well, technically he’s on NFI now. The Packers are kind of saving him from having to actually hold out. But this is interesting because they did take all the money for J. Alexander, but when it comes to dead money, if you can take the hit all at once, the smart thing is to take the hit all at once. the Packers can. So they did. They reworked that deal and so now they’re able to to take all that hit in year one rather than spreading it out. They could afford to do that. This is different. This is different. They they could have said, “Well, we’d rather have the flexibility a little more next year. So rather than have these like balloon years in year three and four the same way we’ll have a little bit more a base salary in year one. Now again they they don’t really do this very often. They don’t put big numbers in year one even medium numbers in year one on big extensions very often because this is all fake. I suspect when we see final numbers, what you will see is a very fake fourth year of this extension because every year, every time the Packers do an extension, especially year four and sometimes year three of a four-year contract is fake. It’s two years and then we’ll see. And what the Packers inevitably do with players they want to keep. It’s it’s two years and you rework the deal because you’re not going to play on a fourth year where your base salary is, you know, whatever where your cap hit is $70 million. I think Jordan Love has a cap hit in one of his future years that’s like 70 million. It’s like he’s not going to that’s not going to count. That’s not going to happen. They’re going to rework that deal. And that’s what that’s what you do when you have these big deals is you rework them and you rework them and you push them out and you push them out. And that’s what the good teams do. do that. That’s what the Packers have done for years. Because if you have good players, it doesn’t matter. You just keep working reworking the contracts. They never get to year four of a deal if in year two you go up, new deal. Year four never happens. That $70 million cap hit, that $50 million cap hit, it doesn’t ever happen. And and the players, I mean, they they ought to know that. The agents certainly know that. But you get to say, well, Zack Tom signs for four years, 88 million, even though even if he’s on the team in four years, it will not be at whatever cap number he is slated to be on right now. So maybe maybe it’s nothing. Again, this is just how the Packers have tended to operate. But maybe maybe it’s not nothing. Maybe it’s not. I guess we’ll see more to come. Packers open training camp today. You can actually watch them on the field today. We hear from Brian Goodson and Matt Laflur today, which means starting tomorrow, we will have football to talk about. Hell yeah, brother. Hell yeah. We’ll see you tomorrow. Follow me on all the social medias. Uh follow the podcast on all the social medias. Subscribe to the podcast wherever you get podcast. Subscribe over on our YouTube page so you can stay locked on Packers.

The Packers were the most run-heavy team in the NFL last year, but is that a reflection on Jordan Love or the circumstances? And how much is on Matt LaFleur? Plus, why Green Bay has to learn the cautionary tale the Bengals are teaching the league right now.

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Peter Bukowski, co-founder of The Leap, brings you a daily look at the Green Bay Packers year round with Locked On Packers! Go beyond the latest injury news into what you’re seeing on the field, how it works, and how it might change with new players or against a division rival. It’s the podcast for fans who know what happened, they want to know why and how!

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