The Green Bay Packers pulled off a highly impressive come-from-behind fourth-quarter win over the New Orleans Saints. However, sloppy play early on was a key contributor to them being in that situation to begin with.
“We hurt ourselves more than we helped ourselves,” said Jordan Love after the game.
Buy Packers TicketsOf course, credit to the Saints for capitalizing on some of those miscues from Green Bay and having a 17-point lead heading into the final quarter. But with that said, New Orleans was also in that position because, for much of the game, the Packers couldn’t get out of their own way.
In total, Green Bay was called for 11 penalties that cost them 90 yards. One of those came on the team’s second defensive possession, an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on Kenny Clark, that moved the Saints into Packers territory–a drive they eventually found the end zone on.
Several other of those penalties occurred on the offensive side of the ball, especially along the offensive line, and either killed drives that were finding some success or put Green Bay behind the sticks and never allowed them to get going. Prior to the Packers’ three scoring drives in the fourth quarter, they had four trips into the Saints’ side of the field but left with no points.
“We went into the locker room at halftime and we knew it wasn’t good,” said Love, “but at the same time we knew we were putting some drives together, but penalties and different things – not converting some third downs – were hurting us.”
In addition to the penalties, the Green Bay special teams unit gave up a punt return for a touchdown that made the game 14-0.
Overall through three quarters, there was a lack of execution, specifically on offense. On fourth down on the team’s opening drive, Matt LaFleur dialed up a well-designed play that had big play potential all over it. However, Emanuel Wilson’s toss back to Love was off the mark, and everything went downhill from there.
Later in the first half, Love overthrew a wide-open Luke Musgrave on a deep ball that could have gone for a touchdown. In general, Love was either slightly off on some other throws in the first half, or his pass catchers were struggling to make contested catches against an aggressive New Orleans defense. The run game also again struggled to get going consistently.
“I think I just missed a couple of those throws,” added Love. “I think the biggest one was the one down the middle to (Luke) Musgrave, but I can’t credit it to anything. I think it’s just me being able to stay calm at the beginning of the game and just make those throws. I can’t really credit it to anything, but it’s something that we’ve got to clean up going into next week.”
To cap off a rough first half for the Packers, Love took a sack that resulted in a 14-yard loss and took Green Bay out of field goal range, missing out on an opportunity to cut the Saints’ lead to just two scores prior to receiving the ball to begin the second half.
The end result of all this, along with other factors of course, was three scoreless quarters of football for the Green Bay Packers and a three-score deficit.
Ultimately, a fantastic fourth-quarter performance in really all three phases saved the Packers from falling to 1-2 and wiped away their three quarter’s worth of miscues. However, more often than not, when penalties are this frequent and opportunities are missed, the game has a very different outcome than what the Packers experienced on Sunday.
Winning in the NFL is hard enough, especially when you’re as shorthanded as Green Bay is due to injuries. Self-inflicted wounds only make an already difficult task more challenging.
“We had a lot of mistakes offensively and a lot of penalties that put us in some bad situations,” said LaFleur. “We just didn’t execute most of the plan, at least not the way we designed it. If it is, if that’s the way we designed it, then that’s some bad ball out there.”
