Six years ago, PFF Data Scientist Timo Riske published a [data study on NFL preseason](https://www.pff.com/news/pro-z-pff-data-study-what-to-learn-from-the-preseason) which suggested that while offensive schemes are often very vanilla and not indicative of the team's regular season identity, preseason defenses more closely resemble what teams like to run in the coming months.
Now that we have a year's worth of defensive film from Jeff Hafley, I wanted to look at how he approaches the NFL preseason and if his playsheet looks any different to a regular Sunday in October.
The one irrefutable argument when discussing preseason playcalling is that teams are not game planning for their preseason opponents. Except in the case of a completely new coaching staff eager to get their weekly film study process down as a trial run ahead of the real games, the majority of teams 1) don't care about winning in the preseason and 2) will not examine what opponents are doing and how to counter it most effectively.
Instead coaches want to see how their own roster bubble guys can perform within their scheme. That means running… your scheme, your defense. The Packers aren't running a totally different or fake base defense in August because that would deem the preseason utterly redundant from a coach's point of view.
While nobody wants to give information away in the preseason that can be used against them come September, you've got to look at it from your opponent's perspective. Apart from maybe an intern or two, the Detroit Lions are not investing any resources into watching the Packers' preseason play calls ahead of Week 1 — for a team like the Packers with no changes at either play-caller and very little roster turnover overall, the Lions will just go back and study the film from the end of last year.
**Jeff Hafley's preseason coverage schemes**
**Coverage**
**2024 Season**
**2025 Preseason**
Cover-0
4.1%
0%
Cover-1
17%
24.1%
Cover-2
19.9%
8.8%
Cover-3
35.2%
47.5%
Cover-4
6.9%
1.5%
Cover-6
11.7%
16.1%
Other
5.2%
2%
Already some strong signs here pointing towards a very vanilla preseason defense.
The Packers and Bills are the only defenses without a single Cover-0 call over the past two weeks of football. The Packers have also halved their Cover-2 usage (a crafty call which they had more success with than anybody else last year) in favor of more traditional Cover-1 and Cover-3 looks.
Cover-3 encompasses Green Bay's base defense, just like the rest of the NFL, therefore it makes sense to get as many reps as possible from your roster bubble guys in this defense, to see if they are capable of executing on a standard play if called upon later in the year.
Green Bay's Cover-6 usage is the third highest in football this preseason while their Cover-4 usage is near the very bottom. There isn't much worth reading into here as these are often split-field coverages (i.e. one side of the defense has different rules to the other and there are any amount of possible combinations in play). 2 games is probably just a small sample size and both would regress toward to their 2024 averages in the long run.
**Jeff Hafley's preseason disguises**
**2024 Season**
**2025 Preseason**
Safety disguises
32%
41%
Dropping DL
13.2%
7.5%
The Packers have disguised their safety look pre-snap on 56 of 137 plays through the first two preseason games. 41 of those have involved a safety rotating down from a split-safety look (open-to-closed) while 15 have been the inverse where a box player (typically strong safety) bails deep at the snap to create a 2-high look (closed-to-open). So if you thought vanilla defense involved standing static pre-snap and just playing the coverage you're set up in, you are wrong.
This is right around where the Packers were at last regular season in both O-C and C-O disguises. The Packers call some of the most closed-to-open coverage in the NFL, and I'd bet this point is made in quarterback film rooms all across the NFL during Packers gameweek.
Meanwhile the Packers have dropped defensive linemen & edge rushers into coverage just half as often through the first two preseason games as they typically did last regular season. A key indicator of defensive trickery, the Packers have not eliminated it totally this preseason but they're definitely concealing some of their more exuberant plays.
**Preseason stunts and simulated pressures**
**2024 Season**
**2025 Preseason**
Blitz Rate
24.3%
25.6%
Stunt Rate
20.3%
13.1%
Simulated Pressure Rate
33.5%
21.7%
Overall, the Packers' blitz rate is unchanged. As we mentioned earlier, the crazy all out blitzes are nowhere to be seen. Instead these blitzes are predominantly made up of 5-man rushes while playing Cover-3 on the back end.
Simulated pressures often include plays where defensive linemen drop into coverage so that small drop-off can be explained by the points above. Again, this is simply masking exuberant plays in the preseason, but it is interesting to note that they don't eradicate these plays entirely the way they did with Cover-0.
Similarly, other unorthodox movements from defensive linemen such as stunts are also pulled back during the preseason. In my opinion, a lot of this can be chalked up to the frequent movement of players in and out of the lineup. You don't have the same guys playing 50-60 snaps each game in the preseason, so there's less time to get creative — sometimes stunts are drawn up and called entirely within the defensive line room with their position coach, and they are independent of the coverage scheme on the back end (this is particularly prevalent on obvious passing downs when stunts don't mess with the run fit).
It is noteworthy that in the 2024 preseason, Green Bay's blitz rate was just 12.8%, compared to 25.6% this August. It's hard to gauge whether a defensive coordinator's first preseason is used to test out the looks they want to run all season, or instead throw upcoming opponents off the scent and not know what to expect entering September. Either way, this is the only major difference between last preseason's defense and this year.
Overall, to answer the question: "How vanilla is the Packers preseason defense?" I would say it has definitely stripped back some major components which make it one of the most complex units in the NFL, but it doesn't totally change into a high school defense either. They're still lots of play calls being made in August that could be deciding playoff games in January.