Flying High Again: Why Green Bay Packers beat Philadelphia
By Kenn Korb
Mixing it up
Prior to the past two seasons, Green Bay’s offense was an elite unit, but each season’s iteration tended to bring along its own signature mainstays the gameplan and play-calling would focus on.
In the most recent dominant iteration, that was loading up most of the focus on two high-quality wideouts (Jordy Nelson and Randall Cobb) in the passing game while pounding away with a two-headed slash-and-bash combination (James Starks and Eddie Lacy) to bust apart defenses.
One of the former outfits for this group involved a much different style, reliant not on a small nucleus of players but moreso a deep cadre of effective and deadly weaponry to take advantage of any and every weakness an overmatched defense has ingrained in their very structure.
Step back to the pre-2014 offensive groups, and you see those deep sets of weapons, all getting some level of burn depending on the corresponding defensive unit. Want to play Cover 2? Here’s Jermichael Finley, busting through the heart of your defense. Want to double the outside guys? Cobb, eat them up underneath the coverage.
Play the straight up? One of those secondary guys will screw up; when they do, Jordy/Greg Jennings/James Jones/Jarrett Boykin/Donald Driver (depending on the year) will make them pay. Receivers covered? Hit a dumpoff or screen to Starks/Brandon Jackson. Loaded up against the pass? Bang through them with Lacy/Starks/John Kuhn/Ryan Grant.
These guys all were getting worked into the game, based on both what the defense was showing them as well as living out the idea of throwing as many different looks as possible for this and future defenses to have to prepare for.
Whether it be due to injury flux, inexperience, ineffectiveness, or even Mike McCarthy just not wanting to go in that direction anymore, that kind of massive assault through using multiple players — and the wide array of interesting formations which came with keeping them all involved — has been missing for most of the past two seasons; in its stead, we’ve seen the same few guys getting thrown into the same basic formations, the gameplan simply being to beat the man in front of them.
On some level that does need to happen, but if you show the same thing over and over, teams will adjust to it; from midway through 2015, it was obvious they had to anyone watching the games. Guys haven’t gotten open with consistency, and even with an offensive line giving Aaron Rodgers gobs of unhindered time, they still have struggled more often than not.
Against the Eagles, it seems that for at least one week McCarthy dove into that old bag of plans; lucky for the Packers, it appears to have worked.
Green Bay mixed things up early and often with their offense. We got to see two-back sets and pistol formations. We saw two fullbacks on the field at the same time. Tight ends in the backfield. Six-linemen formations. Motion. Triple options. “Bazooka”.
The usual snap hogs still got their high workloads, but other guys cut into it here and there. Geronimo Allison saw 5 snaps. Jeff Janis picked up 6. New runner Christine Michael saw 2. Ty Montgomery grabbed 16. Fullbacks Aaron Ripkowski and Joe Kerridge grabbed 25 and 3, respectively (with the former picking up Green Bay’s first non-Rodgers rushing TD on the season). Even deep backup lineman Kyle Murphy was involved for a snap.
It wasn’t quite the heyday of tossing every cool idea out on the field, but for this night it was plenty enough to help spark an early lead, multiple time-consuming drives, and a multi-score victory.
Next: Packer Perspective: One step to the crown
It’s a good start, and if these Packers are really going to run the table to try keeping their playoff streak alive, they’ll need more of it.