It's too late to salvage season, but Packers must make big changes on defense | Opinion
Normally, you’d say LaFleur must fire Barry or fire Gray or fire both. But what difference does it make now?
GREEN BAY – There’s something rotten with the Green Bay Packers defense and even though coach Matt LaFleur is up to his ears figuring out how to score more than a touchdown or two per game, he should be making plans for big changes.
By no means does defensive coordinator Joe Barry shoulder all the blame for the Packers’ 27-17 loss to a short-handed Tennessee Titans team Thursday night at Lambeau Field, but whatever it is he is doing or LaFleur is making him do isn’t working.
The number of screwups in the secondary has become so glaring that the Packers can’t even cover a two-man route featuring the past-his-prime Robert Woods and rookie Treylon Burks – who has been a non-factor the past five weeks – with four defenders.
That’s two against four.
They can’t leverage a once-formidable-but no-longer-dangerous tight end far enough to assure he won’t get to the one spot in the middle of the end zone that is open. They can’t get the attention of a player 5 yards away from another telling him he was staying short and the other guy should go deep on a long completion down the sideline.
In short, they are just dysfunctional.
Barry is not the right guy for this defense. He’s a very good linebackers coach, but he was the wrong choice for defensive coordinator when LaFleur was replacing Mike Pettine in 2019 and he’s the wrong choice now.
He’s not the only one worthy of blame, though. Passing game coordinator Jerry Gray either doesn’t believe in what Barry is running or has suddenly lost his ability to coach defensive backs because the chemistry that is supposed to bind the secondary with everyone else on defense is spoiled.
Normally, you’d say LaFleur must do something right this second to change things. Something like fire Barry or fire Gray or fire both. But what difference does it make now? The Packers, now 4-7, are not making the playoffs.
Their offense stinks as much or more than their defense, but so what? The defense was supposed to carry this team. It was supposed to play like a top-five unit. It has top athletes to fill vital positions and enough good complementary players to keep the Packers in every game.
But week after week, something goes wrong at the worst time.
Firing someone in the middle of the season isn’t ideal. Head coaches who are desperate to keep their jobs fire assistants and LaFleur isn’t in danger of losing his job. It won’t do his reputation much good to fire someone busting his butt to turn things around.
Good luck finding a coordinator to take the job next season after dumping someone now.
But after the season, a change is in order. Barry shouldn’t continue because two years is enough time to prove whether you can competently lead a defense. If he can’t get all his coaches or all his players on the same page, then that’s on him.
After Wisconsin’s Jim Leonhard decided he wanted to stay, LaFleur picked Barry to replace Pettine. He knew him from their days with the Los Angeles Rams, and wanted to tap into someone who knew the Vic Fangio defense. He also interviewed Rams secondary coach Ejiro Evero, but went with Barry because he crushed his interview and had been a coordinator before.
It would have taken guts to hire the young Evero, who had been a Packers quality control coach under Dom Capers and Mike McCarthy in 2016, and LaFleur thought he had to go with a safer pick.
After becoming defensive coordinator of the Denver Broncos this year, Evero’s proving to be more than capable. The Broncos rank No. 2 in defense and held the Titans to 17 points last week.
The problem with the Packers’ defense is that brush fires seem to pop up everywhere and Barry is slow to make changes. He has miscalculated how opponents were going to attack his defense starting with the season opener against the Minnesota Vikings when he played mostly zone against all-world receiver Justin Jefferson.
It took him weeks before he started letting his corners play more press coverage. It took him longer to start matching cornerback Jaire Alexander with the other team’s best receiver at least on a part-time basis.
He wouldn’t even consider moving safety Darnell Savage to slot corner until cornerback Eric Stokes went down with a leg injury. He claimed cornerback Rasul Douglas couldn’t play safety even though he played him at safety in training camp.
Yes, he was dealt an unfair blow with the loss of top pass rusher Rashan Gary to a season-ending injury, but his array of blitzes to try to generate some pressure are often vanilla and only in the past two weeks has he called some all-out blitzes.
There is very little that the defense does well on a regular basis.
Barry felt so unsure of his run defense against Tennessee running back Derrick Henry that he changed the way his linemen played their gaps, went with six-man fronts at times and sent his inside linebackers on run blitzes. But he was extremely one-dimensional, focusing solely on stopping Henry and not finding ways to rattle quarterback Ryan Tannehill.
More:Packers' focus on Titans' Derrick Henry backfires in defensive meltdown
His front played well in holding Henry to 87 yards on 28 carries (a long gain of 9 yards), but Tannehill completed 22 of 27 passes for 333 yards and two touchdowns with an interception (127.3 rating). And Tennessee won first-half time of possession, when the game was being decided, 19:25 to 10:35.
What good is it to stop one guy if you still can’t get off the field?
Even when Henry wasn’t in the game, they couldn't stop the Titans. Tennessee converted 7 of 13 third downs and had 15 first downs by passing compared to five by running. The Packers couldn’t tie anything together consistently.
“Football is the ultimate team game,” safety Adrian Amos said. “It could be a couple plays here and there, it could be a couple players here and there, we just haven’t been consistent. When you lose games, that stands out even more.”
None of the other members of the secondary could explain how the coverage errors occurred but said the game plan focused mostly on stopping the run so there were times they were placed in unfamiliar situations. They’re pros and need to be accountable, but when coaches aren’t getting the most out of their players, something is wrong.
Even if Barry can fix this, it’s too late. The season is over and the best the Packers can do is try to make it interesting until they are mathematically eliminated.
When it’s over, they must make big changes with their defensive staff and find someone who can get them on the same page. LaFleur got them into this position with his hire and now he must fix it.