Why They Won: Green Bay Outlasts Jacksonville’s Heat
By Kenn Korb
Bottling up the run
Jacksonville has been a team routinely in the gutters of the NFL standings for what seems like forever, and it’s easy to understand why: they lacked talent.
That is finally changing, however.
Though it has yet to be reflected in their record, Jacksonville has managed to accumulate an abundance of young talent across their roster, especially on offense.
They have their young QB of the present and future in Blake Bortles, two excellent receivers in Allen Robinson and Allen Hurns, a big-bodied weapon in tight end Julius Thomas, and a nice 1-2 running back combo in Chris Ivory and T.J. Yeldon.
The passing game was the more consistent and explosive part of their attack last year, but the hope was Ivory and Yeldon could bring balance to the offense and force defenses to pick their poison.
Green Bay may not have done a great job most of the game against the passing attack, but they did an excellent job overall in stalling out the Jacksonville rushing attack.
The Jaguars ran the ball 26 different times on the afternoon, but on those runs they accumulated just 48 total yards. They did score a TD early, but for the most part that part of their offense was dead on arrival.
Per Pro Football Focus’ grading, many of the defensive players for the Packers with 10+ snaps graded out at least a 75.0 (on a 0-100 scale) against the run, though it may not be the players you would expect.
While big names like Clay Matthews and Julius Peppers seem to have struggled in that regard, less heralded names all across the defense such as Morgan Burnett, Damarious Randall, Mike Daniels (he’s on the path to getting proper recognition, but isn’t quite a household name yet beyond Green Bay), Letroy Guion, and Datone Jones all did more than enough to pick up whatever slack was there and prevent Jacksonville from getting anything going on the ground.
It must be noted that Ivory wasn’t able to play after an emergency visit to the hospital prior to the game — backs with power have tended to be more of an issue than their speed-based counterparts for the Packers defense in recent years — but with so many guys stepping up in this facet for Green Bay it may not have mattered in this one anyway.
This is a great sign for the upcoming matchup against their annual nemesis Adrian Peterson; though it’ll definitely make things easier if the marquee names step up, having a litany of guys ready to make stops can only be good.
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