Here are the Packers play action snaps from this past week. There are…not many of them.
I wrote about this a bit in my piece over at Cheesehead TV this week. Because Brian Flores is a lunatic, the Packers seemed to make their pass protection plan priority number one. Everyone know the rules up front, so you’re prepared when they have 8 guys at the line and bring 6, then bring 3 from the same look on the next play.
(Side note: Flores runs this defense exactly how I love to see defenses. It’s chaos, but it’s well-coached chaos and dudes are flying to the ball. They’re a ton of fun to watch.)
Because of that focus, they made quite a few changes to the offense. Their play action rate of 10.2% was their lowest of the year (their second lowest was 18% in week 3 against the Saints). Their Shotgun rate of 95.2% was their highest of the season (their second highest was 83.6% in week 3 against the Saints). I don’t have their motion number charted yet (I’m a slacker, I know), but it seemed like those were down quite a bit this game as well (it seems to have been slowly trending in that direction over the last couple of games).
In short, they sacrificed some of their eye candy in order to keep their focus on the games the Vikings would be playing up front, while keeping Jordan Love in shotgun to give him a better vantagepoint to see what the Vikings were bringing.
Don’t turn your back to the defense. Keep your head up. Focus on picking up all the nonsense Flores would be throwing at you.
From a gameplanning perspective, it makes a lot of sense (to me, at least). Nothing can wreck a game quicker than failures up front, so you’d better make sure that’s buttoned up against a team that thrives on creating confusion.
That doesn’t change the fact that there were still execution issues and penalties (soooooo many penalties). But for the approach itself? I understand it.