Matt LaFleur's message to Packers players in a crisis shows how NFL has changed | Opinion
When Mike Holmgren was building the Green Bay Packers into a championship team in the 1990s, he lost back-to-back games a handful of times.
That usually brought a big change in the vibe around the team. The locker room, when open to reporters, was like a wake. The few players who bothered to show up talked in hushed tones. Everyone — players, assistant coaches, support staff — tread lightly. I remember Brett Favre saying at times like that he’d pass Holmgren in a hallway and the coach wouldn’t even acknowledge him.
Under Holmgren’s successor, Mike Sherman, back-to-back losses meant a quieter, tenser atmosphere around the team the next week. His successor, Mike McCarthy, was more even-keeled, but when his team hit rough patches, there certainly wasn’t any talk about having fun.
Now Matt LaFleur has just experienced his first back-to-back regular-season losses, and not just losses but truly bad performances. His team is in trouble. And his response?
“Put in the work throughout the course of the week and go out and enjoy this,” LaFleur said he told the team this week. “We gotta have fun playing ball. This is such a great opportunity for — every time you step on that field, you gotta enjoy it.”
Some things in the NFL haven’t changed much over the past 30 years. But one that has is the way the new breed of young head coaches handle players with escalating salaries, free agency and gradually increasing player empowerment.
The list of those young coaches includes LaFleur, Sean McVay, Kyle Shanahan, Brandon Staley, Zac Taylor, Robert Saleh, Mike McDaniel and Arthur Smith. Not that they’re all the same. But they share similar backgrounds having grown up in an NFL where free agency and player individuality were a given rather than a change. Instead of fighting it, they’ve embraced it, at least as much as they can, in the name of getting players to buy in.
Is it the best approach for coaching an NFL team? Well, there’s no one way to do these things, and I can’t claim to know which is best. Bill Belichick is still winning as a buttoned-down authoritarian, so there’s that, though he’s found the going a lot tougher without Tom Brady.
But from a broader view, times change and players change, so coaches change. Is anything lost in team discipline with this more benign approach? Maybe. But players don’t fear coaches like they used to, or at least don’t fear being chewed out. Sure, they very much want to keep their jobs. But they make good money, often with some guaranteed pay and, they know, individually for some and collectively for all, that their coach needs them. And if they’re any good, they also know if one team cuts them, another will hire them as long as they don’t do something egregious.
Sure, teams still dump players, even good ones, they think are a problem. They still take hard lines, like Packers in 2021 when they refused to trade one of the game’s most powerful quarterbacks (Aaron Rodgers) after he demanded it. Teams still hold the upper hand.
But the league and players have changed in the past 30 years. And one of the biggest signs to date is that LaFleur, faced with his first full-blown, in-season crisis, is emphasizing to his players to enjoy the process rather than putting the fear of God into them.
“In that day and age, the coaches were like parents,” said LeRoy Butler, the Pro Football Hall of Fame safety and a locker-room leader during the Holmgren era. “Now they’re more like partners.”
Make no mistake, LaFleur’s 3-3 team is in trouble. There are different kinds of 3-3, and different kinds of bad stretches. There are plenty of “so what” losses in the NFL. The Packers’ blowout loss to New Orleans in the opener last season is a prime example. And there are red-flag losses. The Packers’ back-to-back defeats to the New York Giants and New York Jets are very much the latter.
The Packers’ past six quarters were terrible. Six weeks in, LaFleur’s offense is getting worse, not better, and a defense built to carry the team through rough times cracked in both games. The Packers are a bad 3-3.
Also, this isn’t like 2016, when after four midseason losses Rodgers carried the Packers on an eight-game winning streak and appearance in the NFC title game. Rodgers at that time was still lethal making play after play outside the pocket. Six years later, he still has his moments scrambling and throwing on the run, but he can’t make his living that way anymore.
If the Packers are going contend come January, Rodgers will have to play a lot better than he has, and in a different way. As for whether he’s hitting a big decline, that’s still a hard sell to me for a quarterback who turns 39 in December. There was no sign of it in training camp. He’s never had the arm issues that ended the runs of Drew Brees and Peyton Manning in their early 40s. And the rules evolution in protecting quarterbacks has kept him from taking anything like the beating that finally took down Favre at age 41.
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It hasn’t helped that the Packers have received little help so far from the top of their 2022 draft class. The team needed at least two of the three among Quay Walker, Devonte Wyatt and Christian Watson to be good players this year, and so far they haven’t done much.
Walker has obvious talent at inside linebacker but is a liability against the run between the tackles and has made his share of rookie mistakes in coverage. Wyatt hasn’t been good enough to even get into the defensive line rotation (35 snaps in five games). And Watson, a raw receiver, has hardly practiced or played (3½ games) since the start of camp because of knee and hamstring issues.
It doesn’t mean they won’t become good players. But a third of the season has passed, and this team needs help this year.
But for all the tweaks in personnel and scheme that this coaching staff has to make to find something that works, especially offensive, more than anything LaFleur’s task is to keep his team together.
There’s no knowing what things are like behind closed doors in the football offices at Lambeau Field, though it’s hard not to think they’re on edge.
But faced with his first crisis, LaFleur’s message to his team was meant to release pressure rather than turn it up. It’s a sign that times have changed in the NFL. Sunday in Washington he’ll find out if it worked.