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Christian Watson and the other Packers rookie receivers, Romeo Doubs and Samori Toure, have heard plenty from Aaron Rodgers over the six months or so since they were drafted.
So what they got from their quarterback Sunday must have been music to their ears.
“Shoot, he told everybody just how proud he is of all of us,” Watson said over the phone from the bowels of Lambeau Field after Green Bay’s 31–28 win over the Cowboys in overtime. “And that just going forward, we’re going to look like a different football team. I think that we’ve put in the work, we decided to go out there and show it, and I think that today was only the beginning for us.”
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If that’s true, and Sunday’s win was a turning point for Green Bay’s offense, then the plan the Packers had all along is actually working. The whole idea here was to get a high-ceiling draft class of receivers multiple reps, with the feeling being they’d wind up being better in the long run than an experienced also-ran from another team.
And maybe that process was always going to be bumpy at first. Doubs (fourth round) got a lot of work early, with Watson battling injuries, and flashed first. Toure, the lowest (by far) draft pick (seventh round) of the three, just started playing over the past three weeks and saw his play-time uptick a little more last week after Doubs went down.
But as Watson showed Sunday, the payoff could be huge. While the 6'5", 207-pounder—taken 34th in April and widely seen as a talented, unpolished ball of athletic clay—has flashed early in his rookie year, earning Rodgers’s trust has been a process (as it has for Doubs and Toure), and it sure looks Watson’s got it now. That he finished with 107 yards and three touchdowns on four catches against the Cowboys is a good barometer.
What might be even more meaningful is when those scores came—all three with the Packers trailing in the game, including two in the fourth quarter. And if you listen to Watson describe them, you can hear how he’s adapting to playing in the NFL.
• The first was a 58-yarder on the back end of the second quarter. On the surface, it looked like a simple go ball on a third-and-1, with Watson getting position on Anthony Brown. But there was a little more nuance to it.
“It was just a straight-up go route on my side,” Watson said. “I knew that if they were going to play with that one-high safety away that I was an option there, and 12 [Rodgers] told me before the play the same thing. So I already kind of knew what to expect. The defender was playing a little flat-footed; so I know I just have to win off the line, and get outside, and then just look up and catch the ball. I knew right off the line that there was a big possibility for that to come my way and obviously I went off the line, and the rest is history.”
• The second came with the Packers trailing 28–14, on a fourth-and-7 at the Dallas 39 with just under 14 minutes left. Watson, running a crosser, got past nickel corner DaRon Bland, which is where Rodgers found him.
“That was a play that we called a few times throughout the game,” Watson said. “We really liked that route specifically, with the way they were playing with their one-high look, their man looks. We knew if we were going to get matched with that one-high, all I had to do was break a flat and get open. It was obviously the look we wanted, and I had to kind of adjust a little bit off the release.
“He [Bland] was playing a little bit more inside than I thought he was going to, so I broke outside of him and then just flattened off at the top of the route and obviously 12 just put it in the right spot and it worked out.”
• The third came on first-and-goal from the 7, with the Packers still down 28–21, and less than three minutes to go. At that point, it was pretty clear to everyone that Watson would be in play in the red zone.
“The third one was a play we were trying to get to a few times throughout the night; it was obviously a play we really wanted to get to in that red zone area,” Watson said. “We were just waiting for the right look. And on that specific one, we finally got the look that we were wanting. And I just knew with the low safety to the left, the other safety kind of scooted over to our right side. Then all I had to do was when the crossing space was beat, I just ran.”
And from there, Watson did a counting celebration with his fingers: One, two, three …
“Shoot, there wasn’t much going through my head except just pure joy, pure happiness,” Watson said. “Obviously that one tied it up, just giving us a chance to stay in the ballgame. And after the fact, the job wasn’t finished, and we still had more to do. But in that moment just to be able to keep us in that game and have that successful drive was huge.
Maybe, combined with a healthy Doubs, it’ll be huge going forward for the Packers, too.
What’s clear is these guys are taking steps that could lead to a very different second half of the year in Green Bay. And just as they’re getting to know Rodgers, he’s getting to know them, too.
“With 12, I really think it’s just come down to him just letting me be me and then doing his part, putting the ball in the right spot,” Watson said. “I think that for me, it’s just being able to go out there and play as fast as I can and play as free as I can. Obviously just hearing from him and everybody around me, it’s just going out there and playing fast. That’s been huge for me, because obviously it’s a high-level game playing in the National Football League.
“There’s a lot of things to think about. But obviously the more things you think about, the slower you’re playing out there. So obviously just getting things down, spending the extra time in the film room, extra meeting time with the quarterbacks, it’s just been huge for me.”
And as we said, it could be big for the Packers, too.
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While the rest of us were hyperfocused on Jeff Saturday, it turns out his Colts spent the last week more worried about looking inward for answers. In a month’s time, that locker room had seen a just-acquired, former MVP quarterback benched, an offensive coordinator fired, a head coach fired and an interim coach hired out of the ESPN green room. And at 3-5-1, there really was only one place, as they saw it, to point the finger, talented as the roster has been over the last half-decade.
“It was just a mindset before going out [to practice] on Wednesday,” star tailback Jonathan Taylor said from the team bus headed to the airport Sunday. “Before stepping on the practice field, even in meetings just saying, Hey, even in our own individual rooms, how are we going to respond with all the adversity that we’ve been facing? Our backs are against the wall. How are the Indianapolis Colts going to respond? And the only way that we can respond is through us.
“The coaches, they’ll put together a plan, but without the players, you can’t execute the plan. It was on us. So everybody just came in on Wednesday, practiced with that mindset. Hey, it starts today. It starts today. We need a crisp practice; we need a physical practice. And let’s build from there. It’s on us.”
On Sunday, the Colts shouldered that burden just fine, and with a new head coach to boot.
And Saturday actually wound up becoming the beneficiary of the player-led culture he wants to try to build on. Indianapolis came back from a 14–13 deficit in the third quarter and a 20–19 deficit in the fourth for a 25–20 win, and the cool part, for the guys in the locker room, was how the Colts leaned on reliable, established pillars to get it done for them.
Taylor led the way with his 66-yard touchdown run that put Indy in front 19–14 late in the third quarter, accounting for more rushing yards than the Colts did as a team in four of their previous nine games.
“The guys did a great job of holding blocks, and keeping everyone in their gaps,” Taylor said. “We did a great job of cutting it backside. And then after that, they always leave one [defender] for the back, so it was just on me to make sure that I juked my guy.”
Indeed, Taylor shook the Raiders’ Duron Harmon, and that was that.
Next came Matt Ryan’s reemergence.
Benched before the firings of Frank Reich and Marcus Brady, Ryan and Sam Ehlinger split first-team reps last week as Saturday was ushered in to replace Reich. But their teammates had no idea who would start until hours before kickoff Sunday.
“We love Matt and we love Sam, so it didn’t matter who was in there. But we just felt a great sense of joy having Matt back out there. He’s a Hall of Fame quarterback.”
When it mattered most, he looked like one again. The Colts got in third-and-3 with 6:49 left in the game at their own 25. Ryan stepped up in the pocket to avoid the rush, looked left as he moved to see a flat-footed defense, then tucked the ball for a monster 39-yard gain into Raiders territory. “That was amazing. That was a great run,” Taylor said. “I mean just being able to go out there and watch him run.”
Two plays later, Ryan made a more conventional play, dumping it to Parris Campbell on a crosser, and letting Campbell turn on the jets for a 35-yard touchdown to put the Colts on top for good. “He made an explosive play,” Taylor said. “That’s what Parris Campbell does.”
And so ended a chaotic week for the organization.
Now the hope would be that things settle down a little, Saturday continues to empower the players and coaches as he did his first week, and the players then get to see where they can take the team. There’s plenty on the line (they’re 4-5-1 and just two games back in the AFC South), a lot riding on how this plays out for Saturday, too, and it seems an understanding that with aligned goals should come plenty of teamwork.
“He’s very passionate,” Taylor said. “Given his history with the organization, he just wants to see the organization win. It’s not about him, being around the guys, and getting to say, Hey, I got this amount of wins. It’s just I have a great staff around me. I have great teammates, I have a great team, I want to do my part. It’s not anything about me, it’s about you guys, it’s about the organization, it’s the we-not-me. Once we heard that, we understood that he doesn’t want to come in here and make this thing about him.
“It’s about us. And that’s what we need to do. We need to make it about us. Not individuals. We need to make it about us as a team. So once we heard that from him, we knew it was time to go to work.”
And there’s plenty of work left to do.
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I couldn’t shake this feeling over the past few days—there are a lot of coaches who want Jeff Saturday to fail and wouldn’t mind if it happened in spectacular fashion.
In that way, this reminds me a little of the Chip Kelly experiment in Philadelphia a little less than a decade ago.
Trust me when I say that, in 2013, ’14 and ’15, there were a lot of NFL people hoping Kelly would fall flat on his face. The reason, to me, was mostly job preservation. There are only 32 head-coaching jobs on the planet. And if someone outside the conventional career-path construct is jumping the line, well, then that’s one less job for those inside it. And if that person succeeds, then there’s going to be the threat that more jobs go to people with those unconventional backgrounds, making it even harder to land one the old-fashioned way.
Opening the door for more former players to land head-coaching jobs could create a similar problem for conventional candidates, with old stars being able to jump into the profession, more or less, on a whim. Remember, a couple of years ago, Deion Sanders was laughed at for trying to get the Florida State job. So he took his lack of experience to Jackson State, where he’s won 20 of his last 22 games, is leading an undefeated team now and has become a hot candidate for FBS jobs. Likewise, Mike Vrabel and Kevin O’Connell are former players who were fast-tracked, having served as assistant coaches for just seven years apiece.
Both Vrabel and O’Connell are doing all right as head coaches.
And even Kelly did, which you won’t hear from many people in the profession. Having never coached a day in the NFL, Kelly won 10 games and made the playoffs his first year, won 10 games again in 2014, then sunk in his third year when the roster started to erode around him—which was very much his doing since he wrested personnel control that offseason from Howie Roseman. The problem, you’ll notice, was never that he couldn’t coach or that the NFL had “caught up to him.” It was how to fit into that organization.
So if Saturday fails, then we’re back to the status quo, and the Colts will have made their run, and have to go hire someone else from all those lists we all put together. If he succeeds, then this will get interesting. And it reminds me of a conversation I had with Vrabel a few years back. He’d just gotten to Tennessee, and I asked him a boilerplate question about his swift rise through the ranks, and in a way only he can, he fired back something to the effect of, So my 14 years as a player don’t count? And he was right. What’s more valuable experience: being a rookie on the kickoff team or the guy who’s picking up draft prospects at the airport?
It’s simple, and logical, to think a former player might bring something unique to the table.
It’s also why I’d bet other owners have toyed with the idea of the past. And I think a lot are going to be watching Saturday closely in the coming weeks.
