We’re officially halfway through the preseason, and it’s now Cardinals week. Matt LaFleur will get to host his little brother, show him around the city, and test their squads against each other twice. We’ll get a joint practice between the two teams on Wednesday, and if you are paying attention to the starters, that’s the one to actually pay attention to. There probably isn’t much chance that Green Bay will actually be playing their top guys in the actual game, seeing as how we are getting right down to the wire of regular season play beginning.
While game #3 will be mostly backups and depth pieces fighting for their roster spots, there’s still time for the coaches to figure out the best place to line up all of their X’s and O’s.
To that end, Friday’s game against the Broncos may have given us a pretty important preview of what the offense may look like schematically this season.
We only got to see the #1 starting offense for a single drive this week, but let’s break it all down a bit. Jordan Love went 5/7 for 56 yards in that drive, capping it all off with a touchdown strike in the redzone to Marshawn Lloyd (his first touchdown scored since college, by the way!). In order, his passes looked like this:
An under-center PA dropback, shotgun quick-game pass, shotgun frontside PA-Boot, under-center PA boot (or a least of variant of it, Love never got out of the pocket on this one), under-center PA Boot, under-center PA boot, shotgun Nub formation.
Notice anything there? There’s a whole lot of under-center play action happening, a lot of it coming in the form of bootlegs. The Packers under Matt LaFleur are no strangers to running a ton of bootleg, most of it coming in the Aaron Rodgers days of the 2020-2021 seasons. Bootlegs are a pretty common way to create high % looks in the passing game by simplifying the reads for a QB. You’re oftentimes eliminating half the field and turning it into a triangle (e.g. a deep crosser, flat route, or checkdown). You are also moving the QB’s launch point and freezing the LBs hard.
You’ve also got an advantage because PA Boots marry perfectly with a certain kind of run scheme: wide zone. This is a major schematic talking point within NFL circles, as a way to really put that extra kiss of death on a defense’s ability to dictate anything to an offense. Great NFL offenses are able to run anything out of any formation because you’ve got the air and ground game working in such perfect sync with each other. This is what you see out of McVay and Shanahan systems.
Of course, and specifically for the Packers, this becomes a problem when you don’t run that certain kind of offense. All those PA Boots don’t mean much from a schematic standpoint if you aren’t marrying them up, right? Well, over Marshawn Lloyd’s six carries in Friday night’s game, four came in the form of zone rushing plays, two as man or gap scheme rushing concepts. That’s a pretty small sample size, but let’s consider the whole night. The Packers actually ran almost double the amount of zone plays as they did for gap/man. This ratio is a far cry from where the Packers landed a season ago, when it landed at about a 55-45 ratio (in favor of zone runs). The Packers’ rate of using man/gap running schemes has, in fact, been steadily climbing higher and higher over the last few seasons, peaking at the aforementioned ratio from last season. This has been going on while we’ve also seen Green Bay preferring to add bigger offensive linemen to their lineups. Aaron Banks and Anthony Belton have been on the forefront of this movement (at 325lbs and 336lbs respectively, they are the two heaviest OL men on the roster), but the entire line has not shifted to massive proportions. In fact, there is only one offensive lineman on the entire roster who is under 310 lbs: Zack Bako-Bewele at 306.
Keeping heavy, powerful guards in the lineup is a key factor in a power-based, downhill type of a running scheme that we saw so much of from Green Bay last season. But, and this is where my conspiracy theorist hat comes out, we have already seen the packers trying to move away from having Belton (and to a lesser extent) Banks not play guard at all. For differing reasons, we’ve seen the Packers create some major competition at both spots. In fact, in Belton’s case, it really seems as though he’s already been moved back outside to serve as the team’s swing tackle. It’s an extremely important spot that is crucial to the overall health of an OL room, but certainly a bit disappointing for a second round rookie.
In his place? The 308 lbs Jacob Monk has the inside track to hold down the guard spot, while 312lb fifth round rookie Jager Burton has been the LG for the majority of camp in Banks’ place while recovering from knee tendonitis. MLF himself has even poured gas on this particular fire in a recent press conference, stating: "I think he's [Burton] going to make it extremely difficult [for Banks to reclaim the starting job]," coach Matt LaFleur said on Friday. "I think Jager has done a really good job."
Shifting back to more of a zone, and a wide zone specifically, based running attack helps to mitigate losing some of that serious beef they’d be missing up front. It also is the kind of system that works better for Marshawn Lloyd, and Josh Jacobs should be able to adjust without much issue. I’ll be keeping a pretty close eye on this when the Packers suit up next in just four short days. The preseason is almost done, and I just can’t wait to start finding out if some of these ideas have fact or fiction behind them.
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Co-Owner of the thirteen time world champion Green Bay Packers. Sometimes I write about them. Follow me on Twitter at https://x.com/kjones_in_co and on Substack for film breakdowns!