GREEN BAY — If Jordan Love was angry, annoyed or feeling any other sort of way about his offensive line’s performance in last week’s season-opening loss to the Minnesota Vikings, you wouldn’t have known it from listening to him the last several days.
The Green Bay Packers quarterback certainly didn’t talk like a guy who was mad at the fact that he’d absorbed four sacks and 18 hits while being pressured on 50% of his drop backs (23 of 46).
He didn’t sound like someone who was about to blame the group’s shoddy protection for the fumble and interception he had late in the game, which broke the levee in what turned out to be a 39-22 loss.
And he gave no indication that he was worried about a repeat performance in Sunday’s Week 2 matchup with the New York Jets at MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, N.J.
“There’s times as a quarterback you have a clean pocket; there’s times where you’re going to have to take a hit and try to stay focused and keep your main thing on delivering an accurate ball. I think that’s just part of playing the position,” Love said at midweek.
“I’ve always got that faith [in them]. We all know what it is. We’ve got to be better. They’ve got to be better. We’ve got some situations where, communication-wise, we all can clean some stuff up and make sure everybody’s on the same page and locked in.
“We’ve got some work to do to improve and get better. That’s everybody on this football team. So, I’m always going to have that confidence in those guys that, ‘Hey, we’ll clean this stuff up, we’ll get better.’ I’m going to keep having faith in everybody in this locker room.”
Any Sunday schooler knows, though, that faith is defined as “belief in things unseen,” and given last week’s performance, in which Love’s biggest plays were made despite the pressure he was facing, there’s no evidence that the unit will elevate its collective game — even given the benefit of the doubt that the Vikings’ hyper-aggressive defensive scheme and the noisy, unfriendly confines of U.S. Bank Stadium were significant factors in the performance.
“[That] defense we were playing, you know you’re going to be dealing with pressure all game,” Love explained. “There’s going to be times that they’ll have more guys coming than you have to block. I’ve played [the Vikings] a lot — that’s part of it and that’s just part of playing the position. I’ve got to have that mindset of, ‘No matter what happens, I’m going to try to go out there and do my best for the team and put us in positions to succeed.’”
In addition to the focus that will be different on the offensive line, here are three more aspects of Sunday’s Packers-Jets matchup worth watching:
1️⃣ THE MORE MIDDLEMEN, THE MERRIER.
With a whopping seven interior defensive linemen making the 53-man roster coming out of camp — an unusually high number at the position, even with the defense transitioning from Jeff Hafley’s 4-3 base system to new defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon’s 3-4 — general manager Brian Gutekunst’s explanation was simple.
“Certainly that’s more than we’ve kept in the past. I do think JG uses those guys more maybe than Haf did,” Gutekunst said after the final cuts at the end of training camp. “I thought it was important. And quite frankly, it was just a deep group for us, and you want to try to keep as many of those guys as you can.”
Gutekunst was right on both counts. Not only did he have more defensive tackles than he had spots for — the two who didn’t make the roster, Nazir Stackhouse and Jaden Crumedy, both made rosters elsewhere — but among Gannon’s core philosophies is that the interior pass rush is even more important than what the edge rushers do.
That’s especially important while the Packers’ first-team All-Pro edge rusher, Micah Parsons, languishes on the physically unable to perform list until the surgically-repaired anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee is fully healed.
“Interior pass rush is a huge thing to me because if you can collapse the middle of the pocket, that’s in the quarterback’s lap,” Gannon explained earlier in the week. “Yes, edge rush is cool, but if it doesn’t sync up with what’s happening in front of [the quarterback], he just steps up or steps out of it and it’s no big deal.
“When you collapse that middle of the pocket, he can’t go [forward], so you kind of eliminate where he can step up to. That’ll always be an emphasis —affect the quarterback, right? I think that’s a tool that we have to be able to execute and use to affect the passer.
“In my opinion — I don’t know if this is right or wrong — offenses have more tools to handle edge rush than they do interior. It’s a numbers game.”
2️⃣ AYE, AYE, CAPTAIN!
While third-year linebacker Edgerrin Cooper’s super-productive performance in last Sunday’s opener against the Vikings rightfully drew most of the attention, his new running mate, 30-year-old ex-Indianapolis Colts All-Pro Zaire Franklin more than did his part, too.
Franklin played all 65 defensive snaps and finished with four tackles (two solo), allowed two completions for 13 yards in coverage, and blitzed four times and registered one quarterback hit and one pressure.
As importantly, he wore the green-dot communication helmet to serve as Gannon’s on-field play-caller.
“I just feel like I’m better on the field when I’m controlling the traffic,” Franklin explained. “It’s something I take personal, it’s something I take a lot of pride in.”
He also takes pride in his leadership, which quickly became evident to his new teammates, who voted him to be one of the team’s season-long captains.
“I think he comes in by being himself and earning the respect of his teammates by his actions, and he’s done exactly that,” head coach Matt LaFleur said. “I’d say early on, you didn’t hear him a whole lot; I think he was just trying to feel it out and prove it through his work. But certainly I think the more he’s gotten to know these guys, the more comfortable he’s been. And, he is a grown-ass man.”
After an 0-1 start, that leadership is even more vital in Week 2.
“Honestly, I will just say it was one of the more unique captain votes I feel like I’ve had,” Franklin said. “I would have been myself regardless, but since I got here Day 1 I just try to commit myself to try to serve the guys and try to be there for them any way that they needed me. And I thought it was cool to know that was being received and understood in the right way.
“I feel like sometimes when you come in from another environment, it’s hard to show whether you’re genuine or not because sometimes I feel like that’s only really like proven over time. It felt good to know that the guys knew that I was genuinely trying to be a positive impact on the team and on the locker room.”
3️⃣ SEEING RED
With the offensive line struggles being the primary reason the Packers offense couldn’t put more points on the board against the Vikings — notwithstanding the three points LaFleur took off the board with his fourth-down gamble early in the fourth quarter — the offense as a whole has to share responsibility for managing just one touchdown in four red-zone trips in Minnesota.
The Packers finished last season tied for 14th in the 32-team NFL with a 57.63% touchdown rate in the red zone, but that was with running back Josh Jacobs. Jacobs scored 13 touchdowns last season, and 12 were from inside the opposing 20-yard line.
With Jacobs on the NFL commissioner’s exempt list and potentially facing a league suspension, the Packers went with MarShawn Lloyd and Chris Brooks last week against the Vikings. (Kaleb Johnson was also active but did not get a carry.)
Lloyd and Brooks combined for 20 carries for 66 yards (3.3 yards per attempt), and while each had a double-digit run (Lloyd a 12-yarder, Brooks a 14-yarder), the duo had a combined 40 yards on their other 18 attempts.
If the Packers are going to be more productive in the red zone against the Jets, they’ll need more.
“It just keeps you on schedule, so you’re not in those known pass situations, and then you get more coverage-heavy defenses. Typically, that makes it a little bit more difficult to throw the football,” LaFleur explained. “You get down in the red area, the coverage gets tighter. Obviously, there’s just less grass to defend down the field vertically.
“It’s all about being on schedule. That opens everything up — the run and the pass — and when you get behind the sticks, then you kind of become pretty predictable in what you’re going to do.”
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