Green Bay Packers coach Matt LaFleur doesn’t feel good at all about the performance of his team coming out of Saturday’s preseason opener, but he’s happy the hard lessons arrived now, as opposed to the regular season, and he’s now expecting his team to flush the bad and bounce back with a big week.
“I like that there’s a lot to learn from and improve upon,” LaFleur said Sunday. “And I like that it happened in the preseason. It’s a good opportunity and a good reminder to everyone that you don’t just wake up, roll out of bed and beat teams in this league. You have to come with a purpose. You have to get mentally prepared to play the game. I’m not saying that’s why we performed poorly. But you have to trust that the work you’re putting in on a daily basis on the practice field, it has to translate to the game field. That’s a good lesson…trust your training and your technique and be intentional so it can translate and show up on gameday.”
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The Packers lost 30-10 to the New York Jets on Saturday night. Green Bay was outgained 403 yards to 188, and the Packers didn’t score a touchdown until the fourth quarter with the Jets holding a 27-3 lead. Both the starters and backups struggled.
LaFleur called his team’s performance “sloppy” and “humbling.” He bemoaned all the blown coverages, lost gaps, missed tackles, dropped passes, protection breakdowns and multiple penalties after reviewing the tape.
“There’s a lot of things that we absolutely need to clean up,” LaFleur said. “The encouraging thing is a lot of these corrections, we can correct. But we have to go do it. And we have to be urgent about that. It wasn’t great, but you have to live and you have to learn and you have to move on.”
Players and coaches will have an immediate chance to follow LaFleur’s “move on” orders.
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LaFleur said he wants to see “improvement” and better “competition” on the practice field this week, when the Packers have an open practice Tuesday in Green Bay, a joint practice Thursday with the Colts and a preseason game Saturday in Indianapolis. The current plan is to have starters go through the joint practice on Thursday but not play Saturday, and then the following week do both the joint practice and preseason game against the Seattle Seahawks to finish the exhibition schedule.
“We’re going to stick to our process,” LaFleur said. “Last year, this time, we got a wakeup call versus Denver. You’d rather have it now than in the regular season, but you have to do something about it.”
This article originally appeared on Packers Wire: What’s next for Packers after sloppy, humbling preseason opener?