GREEN BAY, Wis. – The Green Bay Packers lost 16-13 to the Carolina Panthers on Sunday. Never has a three-point loss seemed so devastating, though.
The Packers remain in first place in the NFC North. However, as former coach Mike McCarthy famously said after losing the division title to the Vikings in 2015, “We don’t hang division title banners around here.”
Presumably, that’s still the big-picture view in a place called Titletown.
Maybe the Packers will win the NFC North. Maybe they won’t. Whatever. The only thing that should matter is winning the Super Bowl. The Packers haven’t won one since 2010 and they’re probably not going to win one this year, either.
The Packers looked like a Super Bowl team while beating the Detroit Lions and Washington Commanders to start the season. They’ve looked like just another team for most of their last six games, though.
For a team with a 5-2-1 record, there are more holes in the dam than fingers to fill the gaps.
The crushing blow, obviously, was tight end Tucker Kraft’s knee injury. Other than quarterback Jordan Love, he might have been the most irreplaceable player on the entire roster. Even more than Micah Parsons or Xavier McKinney.
Last season, Kraft emerged as one of the best tight ends in the NFL. This season, he was making a play to be considered the best tight end in the NFL, period. When the Packers needed to rally at Arizona and Pittsburgh the past two weeks, it was Kraft to the rescue.
Kraft was not there to come to the rescue on Sunday. He’s a monster with the ball in his hands. He’s an excellent point-of-attack blocker. He’s a captain. He’s a face-of-the-franchise type of player. It is an absolutely crushing blow.
Without Kraft and receiver Jayden Reed, who is on injured reserve following a broken collarbone but should be back at some point late in the season, Love is going to have to be the most efficient quarterback on earth to direct a winning passing game.
Losing Kraft, however, is the tip of the iceberg.
Green Bay’s offensive line, which includes big-money starters at left guard, center and right tackle and a first-round pick at right guard, is terrible.
Too often, the blockers are beaten physically or seemingly ill-prepared mentally. That’s especially true on the interior. The Panthers have one of the worst pass rushes in the NFL, but they had Love under siege for most of the game. The running game is effective only sporadically, even with defenses begging the Packers to run it.
The red-zone offense, which entered the game ranked seventh in the NFL with a 70 percent touchdown rate, went an incredible 1-of-5. Coach Matt LaFleur, who famously wants his team to come out with its “piss hot,” has an offense chronically plagued by ice-cold starts.
At halftime to start the season, the Packers led the Lions 17-3 and the Commanders 14-3. In the last six games, Green Bay’s first-half scoring totaled 43 points: three against Cleveland, 13 against Dallas, 10 against Cincinnati, six against Arizona, seven against Pittsburgh and six against Carolina. That’s 7.2 points per game. Even worse, the Packers have scored 14 points in the first quarters of those six games.
“Well, we thrive on some explosive plays, and when you’re not getting them and when you’ve got to just move the ball down the field consistently, we’ve had penalties, we obviously had a fumble on the first drive,” LaFleur said.
“We had three possessions in the first half – a nine-play drive, a nine-play drive and a 10-play drive – and we had six points. So, it’s going to be tough if we can’t figure sh** out and score in the red area, it’s just going to be tough to win football games like that.”
On the other side of the ball, the run defense, which showed signs of vulnerability against Dallas and Pittsburgh, was exposed by Rico Dowdle. Dowdle ran for 130 yards – it would have been more than 150 if not for an illegal-formation penalty – and the Panthers ran for 163. While Green Bay’s Josh Jacobs has to scratch and claw for every inch, Dowdle had a lot of easy yards.
“I don’t think it’s very complicated,” safety Xavier McKinney said. “I think this was another game where we got the better team. We just didn’t go out there and execute. When you don’t execute in this league, what happens is you lose.”
Too often, it’s almost as if everyone is waiting for Micah Parsons to do something. When he first arrived, Parsons this week said the mindset at times was “Let’s see what Uno can do.” Parsons didn’t do anything against the Panthers, and neither did anyone else. Not that Green Bay’s defense was bad. It just wasn’t good enough.
With Carolina lining up without its starting right tackle, right guard and center, and then losing the replacement starter at right guard, it should have been a feeding frenzy. Instead, it was the Panthers who ate the Packers’ lunch. Green Bay had just one tackle for loss (the sack by McKinney) and two quarterback hits (by McKinney and Quay Walker).
“Games like this, if you want to be great, you got to find ways to win, especially as a defense,” defensive end Rashan Gary said. “We got greatness in our unit. We just got to find a way to get off the field.”
With the injuries and inefficiencies on offense, it’ll be up to the defense to be not just good but to find another gear and reach “greatness.”
With the meat of the schedule coming up, beginning on Monday night against the Super Bowl-champion Eagles, LaFleur must find a way to get the offensive line to play up to expectations and the offense as a whole to function without Kraft.
However, his fourth-and-8 decision in the fourth quarter throws that ability into question.
With 11 minutes left in the game and the ball at the 13 after yet another receiver screen was blown up, the prudent move would have been to kick the field goal to pull within 13-9. His defense needed a stop to win the game, anyway, so why not kick the field goal, get the stop and try to drive to the win?
Instead, in what seemed like a panic move given the complexion of the game, LaFleur kept the offense on the field, even after blowing a timeout because, in the words of Love, “We were messed up on who was where and the formation and everything, so it was a lot of chaos.”
Love faced immediate pressure – surprise, surprise – ran for his life and chucked one to the middle of nowhere.
“Hindsight’s 20/20,” LaFleur said. “I wish we would’ve taken the points. Didn’t do that there. Yeah, bad decision.”
The defense did get the stop, thanks to the aforementioned illegal-formation penalty that wiped out Dowdle’s 21-yard run, and Love dinked-and-dunked the offense into scoring position for Jacobs to tie the game with 2:32 remaining.
The defense couldn’t get another stop, though, with Dowdle running for 19 to set up the decisive field goal.
LaFleur is an excellent coach. He entered this game ranked 11th in NFL history in winning percentage. But the answers this season have proven elusive, and finding them might be impossible without Kraft on offense, takeaways on defense and a reliable kicking game.
Last week, for some interesting juxtaposition, the Buffalo Bills could have been guilty of looking ahead to Sunday’s game against the Kansas City Chiefs. Instead, they went into Carolina and blew out the Panthers 40-9. On Sunday, the Packers, with one of those games-of-the-season matchups against the Eagles looming, “got our ass beat,” as LaFleur put it, by the Panthers.
“We’ve got to be more consistent, and we’ve got to do a better job coaching, obviously, and then ultimately we’ve got to do a better job in just relying on our core fundamentals – the things you work on consistently day in and day out – otherwise you get beat,” LaFleur said.
“You can’t have holding penalties, you can’t fumble the football. You’ve got to be able to tackle, you’ve got to be able to stop the run. Just base football principles, and if you don’t do them well, you’re susceptible to getting beat, it doesn’t matter who you’re playing.”
To listen to the players, the only team that’s beaten the Packers this season is the Packers. That’s probably correct. But eight games into the season and with no perceptible progress in addressing those get-you-beat issues, the injury and insult of what happened against the Panthers seems like a mountain too steep to climb for a team that seemed to have the ingredients to finally add another Lombardi to the trophy case.
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