The Packers’ slide is exposing Matt LaFleur’s biggest weakness
By Jack Brentnall
There is a natural temptation to overreact to Week 1.
The Green Bay Packers blew a 22-10 third-quarter lead against the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday, surrendering 29 unanswered points on their way to an ugly 39-22 defeat. In today’s world of social media analysis and a lack of patience, it was the sort of collapse that inevitably leads to questions about the head coach, particularly one entering his eighth season in charge.
This isn’t really about one game though.
Green Bay has now lost six consecutive games, stretching back to last December, and is just 9-10-1 across its last 20. A team that spent much of the early LaFleur era among the NFC’s elite has increasingly looked stagnant.
That does not mean LaFleur should be on the hot seat. The Packers have posted a winning record in six of his seven completed seasons – the exception was an 8-9 campaign in 2022 – and have reached the playoffs in each of the past three. More importantly, there are areas in which LaFleur has an extremely strong argument to be considered among the best coaches in football.
But the longer the Packers’ current slide continues, the more relevant one particular question becomes. For all of LaFleur’s ability as an offensive coach, how good is he at building and managing a coaching staff?
Matt LaFleur the offensive coach is not the problem
It is difficult to find much to criticise when looking at LaFleur’s offensive record in Green Bay.
Since he arrived in 2019, the Packers rank second in the NFL in EPA per play, trailing only Buffalo. They rank third in success rate over the same period.
Aaron Rodgers winning consecutive MVP awards in 2020 and 2021 obviously plays a significant role in those numbers, but the post-Rodgers transition might actually be the most impressive part of LaFleur’s résumé.
Over the three seasons since Rodgers left Green Bay, the Packers rank fifth in EPA per play and seventh in success rate.
Jordan Love has developed into a high-level starting quarterback. Malik Willis arrived in Green Bay after Tennessee was prepared to move on from him for a seventh-round pick, performed impressively whenever called upon and parlayed those opportunities into a three-year, $67.5 million contract with Miami this offseason.
LaFleur’s schematic ability has never really been in doubt. He is creative, consistently manufactures answers for his quarterbacks and has shown an ability to adapt his offense around different personnel.
While Packers fans may have periodic frustrations with his offense, it’s tough to argue with the fact that he is one of the best schematic minds in the NFL. Yet being a high-level NFL head coach requires considerably more than designing an offense and that is where his record becomes more complicated.
A recurring reluctance to make changes
Practically every head coach makes bad hires. The more revealing question is what they do once it becomes apparent that a hire has not worked.
Joe Barry is perhaps the clearest example of the concern with LaFleur. In Barry’s first season as defensive coordinator in 2021, Green Bay ranked 19th in defensive EPA per play and 26th in success rate. In 2022, the Packers ranked 26th in both.
Despite plenty of calls for a change, Barry returned for a third season. Green Bay subsequently finished 23rd in EPA per play and 26th in success rate in 2023. Across Barry’s entire tenure, the Packers ranked 26th and 30th respectively in those categories.
Eventually, Green Bay made the change. Jeff Hafley arrived in 2024, improved the defense and performed well enough over his two seasons to become Miami’s head coach this offseason.
The problem was not so much the failure of Barry, but the amount of evidence Green Bay appeared to require before moving on.
It’s a similar story with special teams. The Packers ranked 25th in special teams EPA per play in each of Rich Bisaccia’s final two seasons as coordinator. He was not fired after either. In fact, he ultimately stepped down himself following the 2025 season.
LaFleur and the Packers front office clearly value stability, but there is a difference between stability and inertia. During his time with Green Bay, LaFleur has developed a pattern of being extremely patient with coaches and units that provide relatively little reason for that patience to be rewarded.
A lack of organisational renewal
Not every great head coach needs to produce a collection of successful protégés, but they can tell us something about an organisation’s ability to identify and develop coaching talent.
Compare Green Bay with two of LaFleur’s most obvious contemporaries.
Sean McVay’s staffs in Los Angeles have produced Kevin O’Connell, Zac Taylor and Liam Coen, all of whom have gone on to become NFL head coaches.
Kyle Shanahan’s San Francisco operation helped Mike McDaniel emerge as one of the league’s most creative offensive minds during his time in Miami, while Klint Kubiak parlayed a Super Bowl-winning season as Seattle’s offensive coordinator into a head coaching opportunity this offseason.
That is without even considering the defensive coaches who have passed through their buildings, including DeMeco Ryans, Robert Saleh and Raheem Morris.
Neither Shanahan or McVay is personally responsible for every success his former assistants have elsewhere, but their organisations have repeatedly identified talented coaches, put them in positions to develop and then watched other NFL teams decide they want a piece of what those staffs have built.
Green Bay’s record under LaFleur looks markedly different.
The two most prominent offensive coaches to leave his staff for major opportunities elsewhere are Nathaniel Hackett and Luke Getsy.
Hackett’s tenure as Denver’s head coach was an unmitigated disaster. Getsy struggled as offensive coordinator in Chicago and Las Vegas and is now back in Green Bay as quarterbacks coach and assistant head coach.
Hafley is an important counterexample. LaFleur identified him as his defensive coordinator in 2024 and two years later the Dolphins made him a head coach. That deserves mentioning, although it is still far too early to know how he will fare in that role.
But one potentially successful hire does not invalidate the broader question. After seven years of sustained team success and consistently strong offensive production, why has so little coaching talent emerged from Green Bay to become coveted elsewhere?
The broader problem with this is that it leads to a lack of organisational renewal. McVay and Shanahan have repeatedly been forced to replace talented assistants because other organisations have hired them away. That creates its own difficulties, but it also forces an organisation to continuously iterate and identify the next coach capable of taking on greater responsibility.
Green Bay has not experienced that process to anything like the same extent.
And if your assistants are not being hired elsewhere, it becomes even more important to be willing to upgrade internally when things are not working. To this point, LaFleur has not demonstrated that ruthlessness and given that we are entering year eight of his tenure, you wonder if he ever will.
The decline in the trenches
Adam Stenavich was a good offensive line coach. During the early part of LaFleur’s tenure, the Packers consistently fielded strong offensive lines despite personnel turnover. They developed players, found contributors and appeared to have one of the league’s better pipelines at the position. Stenavich was subsequently promoted to offensive coordinator in 2022.
It is difficult to isolate precisely what impact he has had in that role. LaFleur remains the architect and playcaller of the offense, and the Packers have continued to produce at a top-10 level in both EPA per play and success rate since Stenavich’s promotion.
But external interest has been limited. Despite four seasons as offensive coordinator of one of the league’s best offenses, Stenavich has received just one head coaching interview, when he was one of 17 candidates interviewed by Chicago in 2025. That in and of itself is telling of how the rest of the league views him and his impact within the Packers’ offensive operation.
Meanwhile, his promotion created another vacancy. Luke Butkus moved up to offensive line coach and an area that had previously been one of Green Bay’s greatest strengths has progressively become a concern.
That is not to absolve others of their role in the offensive line struggles. Roster construction matters and Brian Gutekunst and the front office have failed to replenish the unit as effectively as they did earlier in LaFleur’s tenure.
Recent draft picks have not developed as hoped. Green Bay also committed significant money to Aaron Banks in free agency and that has looked like one of the worst contracts in the NFL ever since.
More broadly, the front office deserves its share of scrutiny for the roster’s deterioration. According to Pro Football Reference’s weighted Approximate Value, Green Bay ranks 29th in average wAV from its first-round selections between 2021 and 2025, ahead of only the Raiders, Titans and 49ers. The Packers have had some hits in the later rounds, but it is difficult to argue that they have found the level of premium talent expected from their first round selections.
We have now reached a point where the offensive line increasingly feels like a muddle rather than a plan. Players have moved between positions, the best five has remained unclear and a unit that Green Bay once seemed able to rebuild almost automatically no longer has that same identity.
Even deep into the summer, the Packers did not appear to have a settled starting combination. Injuries exacerbated the situation, particularly Aaron Banks’ knee problem, but the uncertainty at guard continued into the opening week. With Banks unavailable against Minnesota, Donovan Jennings and Jacob Monk made their first NFL starts alongside one another.
That raises questions about how Green Bay builds its staff. did they take one of their better position coaches, move him into a role where his value is much harder to identify, and then weaken the position group he left behind? It’s difficult to say that for certain without being in the building, but that is exactly the sort of staff-building problem that can gradually compound.
Flores exposed the problem
Minnesota might have been the worst possible opening week matchup for this version of Green Bay’s offensive line.
Brian Flores’ pressure packages challenge even the smartest coaches and most cohesive units. Minnesota crowds the line of scrimmage, threatens pressure from multiple points, drops apparent rushers into coverage and attacks from elsewhere. The picture presented before the snap can change completely once the play begins.
That places an enormous burden on communication, protection calls and assignment discipline. Linemen must recognise threats, exchange assignments and respond collectively to movement after the snap.
An unsettled unit starting two inexperienced guards alongside one another was always likely to be tested, and it was clear from the off that Flores smelled blood in the water. Per PFF, Jordan Love was blitzed on 40 of his 46 dropbacks in Week 1. He was pressured on more than 50% of his plays and according to Next Gen Stats, four of Green Bay’s five starting linemen had an average time to pressure within 2.5 seconds.
If you’re trying to find the optimistic angle here, it is that few other defensive coordinators will be able to recreate the cocktail of pressures that Flores dished out, and none will have the stones to attack Green Bay with anything close to the same frequency.
But that is not an excuse. The Packers knew what was coming. LaFleur, Stenavich and Love had all publicly discussed the difficulty of Minnesota’s pressure packages during the build-up to the game.
They had an entire offseason to prepare for this, yet watching the game back, too many of Green Bay’s failures were basic mistakes, missed assignments, blown protections and communication failures.
As much as Green Bay looked like a unit overwhelmed by an exceptional scheme, they also looked like one that was insufficiently prepared. That is what makes the performance relevant to the broader discussion about LaFleur’s staff.
The Packers entered the season without a settled five, arrived at the matchup most likely to expose that lack of cohesion and proceeded to make precisely the communication and assignment errors an unsettled line is prone to making.
Arriving at Week 1 in that position is as much an organisational failure as it is one of execution.
The problems extend beyond protection
Sunday’s defeat also fit into a wider pattern of late-game collapses that is becoming difficult to ignore.
Since Green Bay’s defeat in Denver last season, the Packers have been outscored 90-15 in the fourth quarter and overtime.
The source of those collapses has varied from game to game and while blame cannot be put solely at the door of one party, it again feels like it is becoming a symptom of this team and this staff that they cannot close out games when it really matters.
Execution, adjustments, discipline, depth and coaching all feed into that.
The Minnesota game encapsulated the concern. Green Bay’s protection failures helped Minnesota drag itself back into the contest, but they were accompanied by defensive mistakes, ill discipline, special teams issues and an inability to arrest the momentum once the game began slipping away.
A team that led 22-10 with little more than five minutes remaining in the third quarter did not simply lose. It conceded 29 unanswered points to a division rival playing most of the game with its backup quarterback.
This is not a call to fire Matt LaFleur
There will inevitably be calls for LaFleur’s job after the way last season ended and the manner in which Green Bay opened 2026 – I have already seen plenty of them.
As much as I think there are legitimate reasons to be concerned with this team, I do not think that is a particularly sensible position.
Replacing a coach who has consistently produced one of the NFL’s best offenses, navigated the transition away from a Hall of Fame quarterback and reached the postseason in six of seven seasons would carry enormous risk.
Good head coaches are difficult to find – there are plenty of NFL franchises who would be all too quick to remind you of that – and LaFleur is a good head coach. But that does not mean he should be beyond criticism.
The Packers’ recent results have made it increasingly important to separate Matt LaFleur the offensive architect from Matt LaFleur the person responsible for the entire football operation. As an offensive coach he has repeatedly demonstrated that he belongs among the league’s best. The latter has questions to answer.
Green Bay has been slow to move on from underperforming assistants. Its staff has produced surprisingly little successful upward mobility. Promotions have not always replenished themselves with the next talented coach underneath. Previously dependable areas of the team have deteriorated.
And the organisation itself increasingly feels as though it needs fresh momentum. That is what makes the lack of organisational renewal concerning. It was not particularly damaging when Green Bay was winning 13 games every season and it was easier to overlook when the Love-led transition appeared to be accelerating ahead of schedule.
It becomes considerably harder to dismiss when the Packers are 9-10-1 over their last 20 games and riding a six-game losing streak.
The Flores matchup gives Green Bay some reason to believe its offensive line will not look quite so dysfunctional every week, but that doesn’t answer the question of why it looked so unprepared in the first place.
It is a long season and Green Bay may well turn things around to a point that Sunday’s loss looks like little more than an aberration. But whatever happens, there are questions about LaFleur’s ability to build and manage a staff and quite how that impact’s the Packers’ ability to compete at the highest levels moving forward.
JACK BRENTNALL
HEAD OF NFL DRAFT CONTENT
Previously the founder of The Jet Sweep, Jack joined The Touchdown as head of Draft Content in 2024. A Scouting Academy alumnus, Jack has been Covering the NFL Draft since 2020. Follow him on Twitter @Jack_Brentnall.
