At this point, many Green Bay Packers fans are asking the same question: Why does it always seem like the team has one of the worst special teams in the league year over year?
Green Bay has experienced considerable success since Ted Thompson took over as general manager in 2005, followed by Brian Gutekunst in 2018, reestablishing the Packers’ draft-and-develop culture after Mike Sherman’s tenure. Since then, Green Bay has had 12 double-digit win seasons and has won a Super Bowl.
But over seven different special teams coordinators — John Bonamego, Mike Stock, Shawn Slocum, Ron Zook, Shawn Mennenga, Maurice Drayton and Rich Bisaccia — it feels like the team has some up short in the kicking game. So, I wanted to check out some numbers to see if the sentiment holds up to the facts.
Rick Gosselin, a legendary sportswriter, used to publish his yearly special teams scores, which are probably the best free-to-public special teams metrics that are available for this entire time period that we’re going to be talking about. All you need to know about these numbers is that the lower the score, the better it means that a unit is playing. We’re using golf rules here.
Below is the graph of how all 32 NFL franchises scored for Gosselin from 2005, when the draft and develop wave started again in Green Bay, and 2023, the final year that Gosselin published these numbers before retiring the exercise.
So, no, Green Bay fans, your eyes are not lying to you. The Packers have by far the worst special teams in the NFL over a roughly two-decade stretch.
29 NFL teams are within 10 percent of the league-wide average in Gosselin’s special teams metrics over this time. The exceptions are the New England Patriots, Baltimore Ravens and Packers. The Patriots, who have performed 15 percent better than the league average, were famously the opposite of a draft-and-develop program during their title runs. If Bill Belichick didn’t think a second-round pick was cutting it, there weren’t three more years of development that were going to be forced just because of the player’s draft status. The player was simply going to be waived before his sophomore year. The Ravens, 13 percent better than the average, are literally led by head coach John Harbaugh, a former special teams coordinator.
Another notable team that ranks highly is the Seattle Seahawks, who famously had their star players, like All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman, playing significantly on special teams during their back-to-back Super Bowl appearances.
Meanwhile, the Packers, 16 percent worse than average and who haven’t seemed to prioritize special teams for decades, look at the kicking game as a way to get their players rest and to get young backups, of which virtually all of Green Bay’s backups are, developmental opportunities. As we wrote about last week, that’s one reason why 13th offensive lineman Brant Banks, who is no longer even on the roster, was given the opportunity to blow a block on field goal protection on the blocked kick against the Dallas Cowboys, while Elgton Jenkins watched from the sideline. It’s also why head coach Matt LaFleur said he won’t be making a change at the returner positions, despite it being obvious that Keisean Nixon is better suited for the job right now than either Savon Williams or Matthew Golden.
It doesn’t matter how much special teams coordinator Rich Bisaccia is paid. And if the Packers fire him, they won’t be adding another coordinator with his resume, a coach with decades of success, a Super Bowl victory, the only interim head coach to lead his team to the playoffs in well over a decade and one who has received head coaching interviews since coming to Green Bay.
This problem is deeper than a coordinator. It’s about how this franchise structures its entire roster, and that’s why they haven’t met expectations going on two full decades. Beyond just roster construction issues, the 2011 collective bargaining agreement limited practice time even more strictly, which made getting young players ready for the kicking game even more difficult. The Packers haven’t won a Super Bowl, or even been to one, since. This year, the NFL turned up the “special teams matter more” dial with their rule changes to the kickoff, which means that teams have to spend even more emphasis on the kicking game, in both their roster construction and practice time.
After a loss to the Cleveland Browns and a tie to the Dallas Cowboys due to blocked kicks, it’s pretty clear that Green Bay is flunking that test. At this point, it’s hard to imagine that the team will adjust. Their draft-and-develop mentality is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of the team that pulling young players off the kicking game probably seems like a foreign concept to the entire organization.
There are positives and negatives to a draft and develop program, and over a long enough period of time, Packers fans have seen firsthand that the overall consistency of the club also comes at the sacrifice of any ambition in the special teams department. It just is what it is at this point, and should be considered as a tradeoff that the team is consciously making.