Four months ago, the headlines pertaining to first-round rookie receiver Matthew Golden were so ambitious that the one above this piece might have felt unfathomable.

He was dominating training camp, earning praise from teammates and beat reporters alike, and carrying it onto the field with a successful preseason. The hype train surrounding “Agent 0” was born out of not only practice-field flashes, but pure excitement and desire out of the Green Bay fanbase.

He was the first Day 1 receiver the organization had selected since Javon Walker in 2002. They drafted him outside Lambeau Field in an electric moment for everyone involved. Lastly, but certainly not least, he was brought in specifically to be Jordan Love’s alpha wideout of the future.

With uncertainty surrounding both the contracts and efficacy of the quartet of Romeo Doubs, Jayden Reed, Christian Watson, and Dontayvion Wicks, it was time for Brian Gutekunst and the front office to go shopping for a top-end talent around whom the rest of the receiving room would orbit. So, how have we found ourselves here?

In a back-breaking failure of a rivalry loss at the hands of the Chicago Bears, in a game where the stakes were as high as they’d been all season, Golden tallied zero receptions on one target. He carried the ball twice on jet sweeps for a total of four yards. It wasn’t even an aberration; it was more of the same. The snap counts told a familiar story: He was the WR5.

In Week 2, against the Washington Commanders, Love missed Golden on a pair of deep shots that would have put him on the board with his first NFL touchdown. It’s hard not to wonder if we’re living in a dramatically different universe if those passes had landed, if those missed connections kicked off a sequence of events at or near the absolute floor for what 2025 could have been for the highly touted rookie.

With the near-misses, Golden finished that contest with zero catches. Something that stood out about his start to the season was that he was an elite separator, according to Next Gen Stats. The advanced metrics didn’t care how much output there was; they looked purely at the inputs. It painted a picture of a talented young receiver whose time was coming, delayed by Matt LaFleur’s egalitarian and conservative offensive playcalling.

Conversely, Tampa Bay Buccaneers rookie first-rounder Emeka Egbuka erupted onto the scene. He scored three touchdowns on eight receptions in his first two NFL games and was subsequently crowned as the Next Big Thing. Fantasy football pundits began to write Chris Godwin’s obituary. Egbuka’s output stood out as being dramatically above expected, given his low separation score. Regression was in order.

It has taken a lot of time for the faucet of praise and amazement to shut off, but it has somewhat. The Ohio State product has scored once since Week 6, and those experts who thought it was over for Godwin? They can go ahead and start with Jalen McMillan, who joined Godwin and Mike Evans in running more routes than Egbuka in Week 16’s pivotal contest for the inside track to the NFC South crown.

The correct answer on Egbuka? Probably somewhere in the middle. The correct answer on Golden? Probably somewhere on the better side of what we’ve seen so far.

I believe that what we have gotten is a perfect storm working against him. You have LaFleur’s run-first, slow-paced, conservative, and egalitarian offensive system. He came out and said it himself: “We don’t force-feed guys the ball.”

A criticism of Green Bay’s offense in years past has been that everyone on the outside is WR2-quality, which is great for depth but unfortunate when Love needs a go-to guy. LaFleur hasn’t made any effort to condense that distribution. He gives Golden an end-around now and then when he’s looking particularly cold, but those haven’t been effective all year.

You also have, in what was an unexpected result, Christian Watson emerging from a torn ACL looking like everything he was supposed to become out of North Dakota State. Even Watson and his agent were shocked, judging by the $13 million extension he signed before returning to the field. It now feels highly unlikely that he plays on that contract.

Watson has hit his patented home runs and matured into a volume guy that Love can rely on. His route tree has developed in a way that all but ensures Doubs will be on his way out this spring. Finally, you have some games that Golden missed due to injury, including the greatest contest of Wicks’ career. Those are valuable opportunities early in a player’s career to gain experience and step up into injury-induced voids.

It simply feels like we have gotten a bottom-end outcome at every turn, from individual plays to systemic offensive choices and priorities. The correct answer, as I surmised earlier, is probably somewhere on the better side of this. The question is, where?

The near-miss touchdown in Week 2 is one thing, but making it to Week 17 without finding the end zone at all is very much another. Savion Williams, a rookie receiver the Packers drafted two rounds later, found the end zone in Week 8. Hell, Bo Melton converted back from cornerback to wide receiver in time to connect on a 45-yard touchdown bomb from Love before Golden did. It’s hard to scream “variance, variance, variance” in the face of some of these realities.

Is Matthew Golden a bust? I am going to say no, he’s not necessarily a bust. He also ain’t Malik Nabers or Jaxon Smith-Njigba, but we already knew that. He was never a volume guy at Texas, catching 3.6 passes on average in his final collegiate season.

But can he provide reliable playmaking in between Watson’s field-stretching game and Reed’s gadgetry? There’s nothing about his profile that says he can’t. It’s up to Gutekunst and LaFleur to get together this offseason and figure out how to get from point A to point B. At some point, it’s just going to have to involve targets.