Much has been made of the Green Bay Packers’ inability to get over the playoff hump, not only last season but in the prior six as well under head coach Matt LaFleur. And for good reason.
Playoff exits before the Super Bowl, let alone the Divisional Round, may be good enough in other NFL cities. Not Green Bay. And after three consecutive seasons as the NFC’s No. 7 seed and two straight years bowing out in the wild-card round, tensions among the fanbase are understandably high, especially after new team president Ed Policy extended the contracts of both LaFleur and general manager Brian Gutekunst following the 2025 season.
There may be a silver lining, however, as the Packers enter the 2026 season coming off yet another postseason disappointment, even if this one was their most gut-wrenching since the 2014 NFC Championship Game.
Injuries. Yes, injuries are the silver lining.
There’s injured, and then there’s whatever the Packers were down the home stretch. One of the NFL’s best tight ends, Tucker Kraft, tore his ACL in Week 9. Their best defensive tackle, Devonte Wyatt, suffered season-ending leg and ankle injuries in Week 13. Their best offensive lineman, Zach Tom, suffered what ended up being a season-ending knee injury in Week 15. And later in that game against the Denver Broncos, their best player overall and one of the league’s best defensive players in edge rusher Micah Parsons tore his ACL.
“I hate to be an excuse guy,” Kraft said on locker cleanout day. “But we just need everyone healthy.”
The collapse in Chicago was brutal, no matter how you slice it. Both of them, quite frankly, the one in Week 16 and the one in the wild-card round. But at the time of Parsons’ injury in Denver the week before the first crumbling at Soldier Field, the Packers sat atop the NFC North at 9-3-1 and led the AFC’s eventual No. 1 seed in the third quarter. Parsons’ torn ACL felt at the time like the nail in Green Bay’s coffin, emotionally and tactically. Not just because of how significant his injury was, but because it came after blows to Kraft, Wyatt and Tom, the Packers’ best players at three other positions. Sure enough, the team crumbled down the stretch in Denver and until the season was officially over, losing five straight to end the year.
What if the Packers had just two of those four players in the postseason? What if they had just Parsons? How different would their fate have been? No what-ifs will heal the pain of blowing an 18-point second-half lead to your arch rival with the season on the line, but perhaps the returns of all four can inject some optimism into Year 8 of the LaFleur era in Green Bay because of what the Packers could have been if they weren’t completely ravaged toward season’s end.
“I think you have to be able to overcome injuries, whatever those are, and we didn’t, certainly at the end of the season,” Gutekunst said last week at the NFL’s annual league meeting in Phoenix. “But I do believe in our team very much. I think we got a great group of guys, a very talented group … This’ll be a whole new year. They’ve gotta come together as a team, like I’ve spoken about many times. It doesn’t matter how much talent they have if they don’t come together as a team in order to accomplish ultimately what we want to, but I thought we did some really good things last year.”
The Packers weren’t major players in free agency and they don’t have a first-round pick in the draft because they shipped it to the Dallas Cowboys as part of the Parsons trade, so optimism for 2026 may not come from external additions. There wasn’t a Josh Jacobs or Xavier McKinney arriving from another team in March and there won’t be a flashy first-round pick to salivate over watching in training camp. If you treat the returns of Kraft, Wyatt, Tom and Parsons as external additions, though, there’s no reason to doubt the Packers will be right back in legitimate Super Bowl contention since that’s exactly where they were before the injury bug tore through Lambeau Field. Of course, there’s the question of how all four rehabbing players will perform coming off major injuries, so knock on wood if you’re a Packer fan in hopes of their returns to form.
Kraft said shortly after the season ended that come Week 1, he’ll be 10 months post-surgery and “hopefully bulletproofed by then.” Tom said on locker cleanout day that he was about to have surgery to repair a partially torn patellar tendon and recovery would take six months, slotting him to return at the start of training camp. Wyatt said his recovery would take anywhere from 3-5 months, so he should be ready to roll by camp, too. Parsons said he expects to miss the first three or four games of next season, but you can bet your bottom dollar that he’ll be fighting Green Bay’s medical staff to play earlier than that.
Last time we checked, the Packers still have players named Jordan Love, Christian Watson, Edgerrin Cooper, Jacobs and McKinney, among others, who will welcome those four standouts back to a roster that is among the league’s most talented.
“There was no point in the season where I felt like we weren’t a championship-caliber team. At no point in the year,” Parsons said in January. “Even after my injury.”
You can respect that Parsons won’t trash the guys left after he went down, but we all know what remained of the Packers after that fateful Sunday in the Rocky Mountains wasn’t Super Bowl-caliber. What returns to Ray Nitschke Field in Green Bay come late July, and the all-world talent in Parsons soon to follow, could very well be. And that’s reason enough to have your glass half full amid an albeit dispiriting time to be a fan of this team.