Green Bay Packers: Predicting 2016 regular season record

Week 4

BYE WEEK

With the bye week hitting early, this will be a chance for us to regroup and have a decent early indication of just how good this team can be.

Already, we’ll have seen this team take on multiple division opponents and an expected upstart, all with defenses that either have proven to be strong or the pieces to possibly get themselves there in the near future; they each bring interesting matchups with their offenses that should test each level of the Packers defense.

We’ll get some quick evidence as to whether the young secondary is taking another step towards being elite (Ha Ha Clinton-Dix, Damarious Randall, and Quinten Rollins will all be looked to for this), and if the moves at linebacker (Blake Martinez at ILB; Matthews back at OLB) and on the defensive line (Kenny Clark, Dean Lowry) are set to take this defense from inconsistent to top-10 status.

This will also be a nice early point to get multiple players healthy and check in on the status of the players who are integral to getting the Green Bay offense back to its usual heights.

There are numerous receivers who either aren’t quite healthy yet (Jeff Janis and Trevor Davis) or need to work through their inconsistencies after returning from previous injuries (Ty Montgomery).

New starter at LG Lane Taylor will have had three games to give an early look into whether the coaches were correct to pick him as Josh Sitton‘s replacement; under somewhat different circumstances, J.C. Tretter will be doing something similar at center. Jared Cook will have had a few games to see if he can reach into his vast potential, or if he’s just going to continue being underwhelming despite finally having an elite quarterback.

Nelson will be even further removed from his ACL tear with some game action under his belt, and Lacy will have had a decent opportunity to put behind the negative vibes from 2015 (as well as his yearly slow starts). If enough of those areas wind up being on the positive end for the Packers, this team should be lethal on that side of the ball again, striking fear into opponents as we all have loved to see.

There will of course be some inevitable injuries that crop up between now and then; while we can’t reasonably predict exactly who those players might be and how severe the injuries could be, it will happen on some level and this will be the best time of the year for the team to regroup and prepare for the long slog that’s coming.

Next: Packers vs. Giants