Every Tuesday evening for the past, oh, 4 years or so, I record an episode of the Pack-A-Day Podcast with my good friends Sarah Kelliher and Steve Perhach. We always ask for questions from our listeners. We get so many good questions and it gives us an opportunity to talk about things we may not otherwise talk about.
This week we didn’t have an episode because I got to sit down and chat with Mina Kimes about the Packers.
I got to sit down and chat with MINA KIMES about the Packers.
I’ve been a huge fan of hers for years, and I’ve always wanted an opportunity to talk some football with her. The stars aligned and I am thrilled beyond belief that I was able to have this conversation. She could have not been more gracious and kind, and I think we had a really great chat about the Packers 2023 season. Truly one of the highlights of my football-covering days, even if I did come off as a bumbling buffoon for most of it.
Anyway, because of this slight interruption in our schedule, I thought I would still put a call out for questions and answer a few here. Because content don’t create itself.
Let’s answer some questions. My plan was to embed the tweets I got, but that is not possible right now so I’ll just post the screenshots.
Yup! That’s what I do! My week-to-week during the season can be a bit busy. I grab the game, throw the file into a program that allows me to easily split up the plays, then I go through the process of tagging them so I can use them for that week and for offseason stuff.
That’s a whole thing that no one actually wants to read about at the moment, so we’ll just leave it there.
In no particular order:
Willie Quinnie
Samkon Gado
Fuzzy Thurston
Honorable mention to Taco Wallace.
Personally, I’m a big fan of Deguara, and that feeling only grew stronger last year. He did a lot of really nice stuff in the Packers running game and gave a boost to some of the Pony Personnel stuff the Packers tried (and failed) to get going early in the season.
That being said, it won’t take much to post his best year in terms of production numbers. His best year so far was 2021, and that found him catching 25 passes for 245 yards and 2 TDs. Not exactly setting the league on fire, but he was never going to be that type of gamebreaker. (That season was fairly comparable to Kyle Juszczyk’s last few season, but that’s a post for another time.)
It’s been said a thousand times - at least a dozen by me - that TE is one of the hardest positions in the league to transition from college to the pros. You often don’t see a TE really start rounding into form until his 3rd or 4th season. There’s a lot of buzz around Musgrave so far this year, and part of me could see him being effectively fairly early by giving him a limited role to master. “Line up in the slot or in-line and run one of these 3-4 routes.”
That being said, I don’t anticipate Musgrave or Kraft being huge contributors in the 2023 offense. On the other hand, Deguara is coming into his 4th season. He has an understanding off the offense the other guys don’t, and he has a role he did well last season. I think he’ll be a bigger part of the passing offense, and will be a big part of the running offense.
For Dillon, he has acknowledged some of that himself. He was taken down too easily by ankle tackles last year, which is a strange thing to see in a guy his size. It’s something it sounds like he has been working on.
The Packers had a plan last year to use Pony Package more, but, as I mentioned in the last answer, it failed pretty bad. Some of that was due to Dillon not doing well in the position he was in on some of those. To be completely fair to Dillon, they were asking him to act as the lead blocker; a fullback role that he doesn’t really have a lot of experience with. I’m curious what they end up doing with that package this year and what Dillon’s role will be in it.
One of the things I think the coaching staff can do better with Dillon is put him in better receiving situations. He clocked the highest number of targets in his career last year (43), but I’d like to see some of those attacking vertically a little more. He has shown nice hands and can really get up to speed down the field. I don’t anticipate them doing it multiple times every game or anything, but I think he can be a weapon doing that stuff.
Man, I don’t eat a ton of food at the stadium itself. I tend to gorge myself the day before or the morning of - shout-out Kroll’s West, Parker John’s, Hinterland and Corey Behnke’s house - then stay in my seat for the duration of the game.
So my knowledge is pretty limited. I have failed you.
Brats & curds to start. Can’t go wrong with either of those, and they just taste better in Lambeau.
Wisconsinite. It’s a brat coverage in sausage jam and cheese curds, served in a pretzel bun. Will it kill you? Maybe. But oh what a beautiful death.
Hot cocoa with Irish Cream. Comes in a reusable travel mug. An essential purchase for those chilly December games.
The last question comes from a DM from a private account, so I’ll just type up the relevant portion here.
There has been a lot of talk about Doubs this offseason but very little about Watson. I know these offseason workouts don’t mean a whole lot but I figured we would hear a little more on Watson. Is there any reason for concern here?
I don’t have any concerns, if that helps at all. (It absolutely should not help.) I have a couple main reasons for that. For starters, Doubs was the training camp darling last season while Watson was mainly an afterthought (mainly due to the injury causing Watson to not be on the field). But as the season went on and we saw both of those guys in game action (especially once Watson got a little more “up to speed”), there was no contest as to who the dude was.
If you want to look at some advanced numbers from last year…
I’ve been a follower of Football Outsiders for years. I trust their numbers over pretty much every other advanced metric. DYAR (Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement) is their key stat for measuring a player’s performance against the league average, adjusting for the defense they’re going against. So positive yardage means the receiver was that many yards better than the measured average, while the negative was that much worse.
In 2022, Christian Watson had a DYAR of 133, 29th in the league. Romeo Doubs had a DYAR of -35, 80th in the league.
DYAR is a counting stat, so the more you’re on the field the higher (or lower) that number can be. DVOA (Defense-adjusted Value Over Average) is a rate stat, so that can help measure what a player was when he was on the field, even if he missed some time. (I typically only use DVOA for the full team, but I thought it could be a bit instructive here as well.)
In 2022, Watson had a DVOA of 11.4% (21st) while Doubs had a DVOA of -19.5% (83rd).
Yards per route run? Watson had 2.26 (11th in the league) and Doubs had 1.36 (59th).
Yards after catch per reception? Watson had 6.4 (4th) and Doubs had 4.6 (34th).
I could go on and on, but I feel like that does a good job and also I’m tired. When they were on the field in 2022, Watson was the better player and it wasn’t particularly close. I don’t anticipate Doubs making up that much ground in the course of an offseason.
That’s not to say I don’t like Doubs. I like Doubs a lot. He’s a bit more limited than I thought he was going to be, but he looks like he could become a very solid #2 WR, with a skill set that perfectly compliments Watson’s. I hope we see both of those guys in the green in gold for a very long time.
I love the training camp hype. I love being swept up in all of it, and buying into all the promise that comes with it. But I’m not going to let training camp hype take me that far away from what my eyes and the numbers tell me based on what we saw of those guys last year.