The Green Bay Packers offense has struggled to move the ball consistently this season, and lot of those problems can be traced back to their inability to move the ball on early downs.
On second downs this season, the Packers are averaging 7.86 yards to gain in order to pick up the first down. When facing a second and eight situation, it’s an obvious passing down. This then allows the pass rush to be more aggressive and the defense as a whole to get into favorable matchups and they are now the ones doing the dictating. On second downs, Jordan Love is completing just 46 percent of his passes at 5.3 yards per attempt.
“We need to be more efficient,” said offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich on Monday. “You look at the last two games, the Saints and the Lions here, there’s just been too many second and longs and too many negative plays. That’s the biggest issue with our offense right now. Whether it was penalties in the New Orleans game or just negative plays, taking losses on first down. It’s really hard to bounce back from those consistently. That’s our biggest issue just making sure we’re better on those early downs.”
Naturally, these early down struggles trickle over to third downs. Green Bay’s average distance to gain on this downs this season is 8.2 yards. For context, last season with an underperforming offense, that figure was 6.19 yards. According to Bill Huber, the Packers success rate on third down conversion attempts of four or fewer yards is 75 percent and ranks fourth-best in football. On third and five or more yards, their success rate is just 28.2 percent.
The obvious culprit responsible for Green Bay’s early down woes is their inability in the run game. The Packers are averaging just 3.3 yards per rush this season, ranking 29th in the NFL in that category. With Green Bay running the ball on nearly 50 percent of their first down plays this season, right off the bat on about half of their drives, they are already in a disadvantageous situation playing from behind the sticks
“I think it’s more of just getting more runs called,” added Stenavich. “Like I just said, when you’re second and long, it’s really hard to get the run game going when you have to throw the ball more. We got down in both games as well, so it’s just a matter of us being more efficient at the beginning to get the run game rolling.”
Along with issues in the ground game, the Packers have been penalized 31 times this season, the fourth-most in the NFL. Nearly half of them have come just on the offensive side of the ball, putting that unit even further behind the sticks and adding more stress to the passing game. Then against Detroit, specifically, the pass protection on first down gave the offense really no chance of finding any sort of early down success.
It’s a vicious cycle that the Packers offense ends up finding itself in on a weekly basis and why they have such long stretches of quiet football. Their inability to pick up yards on the ground forces them to throw the ball more. The passing game in the Matt LaFleur offense is built off the run-action, however, the offense isn’t in situations where it can run the ball consistently. The passing game then isn’t as effective as it can be without a run game to build off of and the defense is also expecting Green Bay to pass the ball because of the down and distances they find themselves in.
Any sort of unpredictably that this offense should be able throw at opponents is zapped almost immediately following first down. Then, as we’ve seen, this impacts the defensive side of the ball by forcing them to be on the field more and as was the case against Atlanta and Detroit, the total number of plays ran and the time of possession gets all out of whack very quickly because the offense can’t sustain drives and the defense can’t get off the field. Things just snowball from there.
This Packers offense has a lot of fire power, which we’ve seen throughout the season. However, if they are going to harness that ability more consistently, it starts with being better on early downs, especially in the run game, but really across the board.
“When they’re able to know what the situation is and know they’re going to have to get after the quarterback, that makes it hard on us to hold up,” said Jon Runyan following the Detroit game. “We’re putting ourselves in those second-and-10s, third-and-12s and all those types of things where you just not want to be in. We’ve got to be ahead of the sticks.”
