Last season, I used this space as a way to track the Packers RPO usage on a week-by-week basis. I figured we’d fire that back up, because I’m curious how that may change with a new QB at the helm. So…how did they do?
Honestly guys, I don’t even want to show you. But I’ll power through, because I’m a professional.
Disgusting stuff. Truly horrifying. The run game as a whole didn’t come out looking particularly good, but it went much better without an RPO tag.
One good note I’ll throw out here is that one of the 2 RPO passes was the TD on the fade to Romeo Doubs.
And also, a TD run came with one of my favorite low red zone concepts tagged on the left side.
It’s only one week so I’m not pushing the panic button or anything. I will say that, for as creative as LaFleur’s gameplan was this week, there was a noticeable lack of vertical RPO tags. That was something I was hoping we’d see a little more with Love than we did with Rodgers. Plenty of time left in the season, so I’ll keep holding out hope.
Let’s recap the week a bit, shall we? Let’s see…what did I do…
For starters, I had my first regular season Packers Playbook session with John Kuhn, where we walked through 3 passing plays from the Packers.
I also flew solo on a few videos. I looked at the Packers running Y-Leak and how that plays off the Wide Zone/PA Boot series. I’ve been begging the Packers to run this a little more often, so it was pretty exciting to see it in week 1.
I also dug into one play that featured a passing concept we’re likely going to see a lot this season. The ball was incomplete and was about a fingernail away from being intercepted, so I talk through a couple things that may have led to the incompletion.
I also dug into all of Jordan Love’s incompletions from week 1. I thought about rolling through all of his attempts, but, since his day felt a little uneven, I thought taking a look at his incompletions would be a good way to see where things may have gone wrong, and what that could mean for the season.
Lastly from a video perspective, I took a look at the play that ended Aaron Rodgers’ season. I saw a lot of screenshot analysis going around about the play, with people saying, “just throw to the open man,” so I wanted to dig in a bit. I get into the idea of mirrored 3-step concepts, what he’s seeing pre-snap to drive his decision and what happens post-snap that muddies the water. I’ve seen a lot of people weigh in on this play, but I haven’t seen any actual analysis of it, so I wanted to provide a bit of context.
I also hit some things from a writing perspective.
For Packer Report, I wrote about the “Can” call on offense. What it is, how it works, how it looks, why the QB may do it, and so on. It’s a little different from what I normally do in that space, but I’m happy with how it came out.
For Cheesehead TV, I ran down some numbers from the passing offense, then dug into 4 plays. I take time away from this specific article during the offseason because there isn’t week-to-week stuff to talk about, so getting back to it is like wrapping myself in a warm blanket.
And, lastly, I wanted to gather up some odds and ends that I didn’t get to anywhere else. As I mentioned earlier, LaFleur had a really cool and creative gameplan, so I wanted to show some of those things somewhere. I dug into some funkiness in the formation, the liberal use of short-motion/switch-release, and a couple RPOs in the low red zone that I really enjoyed.