Pete Dougherty: Packers’ lack of explosive talent on offense glaring in season-ending loss to Eagles
PHILADELPHIA − The 2024 Green Bay Packers faded into the offseason.
More specifically, their offense, seemingly brimming with young talent in August, regressed down the home stretch for a team that had much higher hopes than bowing out of the wild-card round of the playoffs with a punchless 22-10 defeat to the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday.
The Packers now head into the offseason with a much different feeling than a year ago at this time. Even in defeat in the divisional round last year, the Packers’ arrow was pointing up. This year, it’s doing the opposite after they ended the season with three straight defeats in which coach Matt LaFleur’s offense was mostly a no-show.
“Obviously we’ll comb through everything,” LaFleur said after the season-ending loss. “We’ve still got a young football team — I’m not making excuses or anything like that — we’ve got a young football team that unfortunately this a tough lesson along the way. Hopefully we can use this as fuel to get better and learn and be a better team come next year.”
The offensive issues have been stark these past three games. The Packers scored only 3 points in the first 2½ quarters in a loss at the Minnesota Vikings, put up only 22 at home in a loss to the down-and-out Chicago Bears (5-12), and then capped it off with 10 points Sunday against the Eagles, who had the No. 2 scoring defense in the league in the regular season.
The responsibility ultimately falls on LaFleur and Jordan Love, but the Packers’ glaring lack of explosiveness has jumped off the field late this season as well.
Josh Jacobs was a workhorse in the running game but the passing game has been lacking
Josh Jacobs (81 yards rushing on 18 carries, 4.5-yard average) is a great starting point for any offense, even if running against Eagles mammoth defensive tackles Jalen Carter and Jordan Davis turned out to be a big ask for this team. In any event, while Jacobs adds an impressive physical element to the Packers’ offensive identity and is a guy they can build their offense around, he’s not a home-run hitter who puts up quick points.
And the Packers had nobody in the passing game to do it. Nobody who regularly turned short passes into big gains, or who consistently was able to out-talent defensive backs over the middle for nice chunk plays that move the ball down the field quickly when defenses are taking away the deep shot, as was the case at season’s end.
Not Jayden Reed, who failed to produce like the difference maker he appeared to be after a highly promising opener against this same Eagles team four months ago in Brazil. Not Dontayvion Wicks, Romeo Doubs, or the oft-injured Christian Watson, who sustained a torn ACL in the regular-season finale and presumably won’t be back playing until mid-November next season. This receiving corps ended up being one of the big disappointments of the Packers' 2024 season.
LaFleur needed his offense to hit high gear for a playoff run at season’s end, but it instead went inert. For at least the past three weeks, everything on offense was a slog.
“It was hard tonight,” LaFleur said. “You’ve got to earn the right to get ’em out of that soft (two-deep) shell, and we never did. You’d like to be able to lean on some of the things in the run game, it was just a little bit of a struggle. We’ll take a look at it, we’ve got to come up with better answers. I think it all starts with staying ahead of the sticks, though.”
Staying ahead of the sticks surely helps, but it looks like receiver is going to have to be one of several priorities for general manager Brian Gutekunst this offseason. The Packers, especially with Watson out, don’t have any pass catchers defenses fear because of their size, strength or speed.
Actually, their most impressive receiver in that regard probably is Malik Heath, who lacks speed but is a man going up and getting the ball at 6-foot-2 and 213 pounds. But then we saw late Sunday why he hasn’t played much this year. On a big fourth-and-3 with 5 minutes left in the game and down 19-10, Love threw an out to Heath, but the second-year pro didn’t have the awareness to get both feet down in-bounds. That’s a play an NFL receiver simply has to make.
Injured or not, quarterback Jordan Love did not create explosiveness either
Explosiveness also can come from the quarterback position, either with making great throws or using his legs to keep drives alive. Love simply didn’t provide enough of that the second half of the season and especially in the final three games. One question with him is whether the torn MCL that sidelined him for two games early in the season lingered down the stretch and affected his mobility and footwork.
If it did, it wasn’t glaring, though his first step escaping the pocket never seemed quite as quick as it was last year. After the game, he said he isn’t going to need a procedure on the knee this offseason. But whereas he said unequivocally his injured ulnar nerve in his throwing elbow from last week wasn’t a factor against the Eagles, he didn’t go as far about his knee, even if he minimized the effect it had on his season.
“Couple weeks after it, maybe,” Love said of the MCL affecting his play, “but it’s one of those things you kinda just play through. I don’t think it affected me too much.”
This is going to be a much rougher offseason than last year for LaFleur and Gutekunst. Their Packers are not the young team on the rise this time around, even if they still were the youngest team in the NFL this season.
And anyone skeptical of LaFleur and/or Love has a lot more ammo to work with, though really, the time to fully judge Love will be 2025, which will be his third season as a starter. That’s the year in a quarterback’s starting career that former Packers coach Mike Holmgren, who’s a Pro Football Hall of Fame finalist this year, always said is when you really find out what you have at that position.
“I love Jordan Love,” LaFleur said after the game, “and how he competes and the work he puts in, and he’s going to get better and better and better. Certainly there’s some lessons along the way, some tough lessons, any time you end up in defeat that’s hard to deal with. He is very critical of himself, and he does such a great job of learning from every experience. Through this, I think we’ll all be better for it, although it’s tough to go through.”
In any event, the time for green and growing is running out. The Packers don’t need to bring in veterans, per se, because they’ve gained a big year of experience this year. Even if they’re on the youngish side next season, they’ll be plenty experienced.
But they need to get more dynamic, and that means adding speed, explosiveness and strength at receiver. That was as obvious as anything watching this team drift into the offseason.