The Green Bay Packers have had to rely somewhat heavily on their passing game early on this season. The issue, however, with a young offense is that the passing game isn’t stable enough to shoulder the needed workload that has come its way.
“It’s just something that we’re going to have to work through,” said Jordan Love on Thursday. “We’ve got a lot of young receivers. It’s not easy, we’ve got a big volume offense. Things happen in the game, timing gets thrown off, routes get thrown off. You’re getting looks that you probably haven’t seen in practice.
Buy Packers Tickets“So things happen and I look at it all as growing opportunities. We come back, we look at it, see what we might have did good and did bad. It’s just areas to improve. We know it’s never going to be perfect. There’s always going to be things to clean up, but that’s one thing that I think, the more reps we get, the more chemistry we get running routes, we’ll just be on the same page knowing what we got to do moving forward.”
There’s a few reasons as to why the Packers have been more pass-heavy to start the season. The first being that the run game just hasn’t been very good. Green Bay currently ranks 29th in yards per rush this season with 3.3. These struggles put the offense behind the sticks and in situations where they basically have to pass the ball.
Defenses have also been daring the Packers to throw the ball. In four games, Green Bay has seen their share of Cover-1 looks and loaded boxes. So from a probability standpoint at the line of scrimmage, when the Packers have a run-pass can called – which is somewhat often – the matchup dictates that they throw the ball since that’s where the opportunity is.
The issue that the Packers are running into is that with all the inexperience they have on offense, specifically at quarterback and the skill positions, moving the ball through the air has been inconsistent, at best. Love has been inaccurate at times—he currently ranks 35th out of 36 quarterbacks in completion percentage.
From a route running standpoint, the Green Bay pass catchers aren’t always as detailed or refined as they should be. This leads to them not being in the precise spot where Love expects them to be and where the ball is delivered and sometimes not even at the right time, throwing the entire play off. We’ve also seen dropped passes and struggles with contested catches present issues as well.
“Sometimes everything is clean and grade out well,” said wide receivers coach Jason Vrable. “And other times, whether it’s the coverage changing or maybe a look that we didn’t see in practice show up, it’s just everybody being on the same page.
“We are playing fast, but then there is the ability to play fast and also be exactly clean and be on the same vision as the QB at times. Those are just details we got to clean up as a unit in the pass game, that way we don’t have those lulls in our offense that have shown up throughout certain quarters. So just things that we can clean up.”
A lot of this is chalked up to inexperience and as the season goes on, we hopefully see it improve. More practice reps is going to lead to a higher level of execution, not to mention that as the receivers get more game experience, they’ll know how to respond to unscouted looks that defenses may throw at them or be better equipped to deal with press coverage—specifically not letting that physicality get them off their spot or disrupt the timing of the play.
Unfortunately, these ups and downs are part of the learning curve and in going into a season with such a young group this should have been anticipated to some degree. As far as making in-game adjustments, there’s only so much that can be done on the fly. Most of the learning has to come from film review and then the application of what was observed between Sundays.
“It’s tough, if you don’t feel it on the field,” said Love. “There’s sometimes you can feel when the receiver didn’t get his depth or the timing was off. We’ll talk about it in the game, but a lot of the stuff comes down to maybe a coach saw it on the sideline but you have to wait till you see it on film to actually slow it down, like you got to get here, you’ve got to get to this depth, so things like that. That’s why we’ve got all the quarterbacks on the sideline looking out for that, the coaches looking out for that. So if we do see that we can clean it up in the game, but sometimes you don’t.”
Outside of time and more reps, the next best thing the Packers can do to help the passing game is by being more efficient in the run game. This will open up opportunities in the passing game, specifically off play-action, and allow passing concepts to build off of the run-action, keeping defenses off-balanced and taking some of that playmaking burden off of Love and his receivers.
