NFL1000: What’s Wrong with Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers?

“You know, we had 400 yards of offense, so I don’t know why the hell I’ve got to come in here and answer questions about the things you think that went wrong.” 

That’s what Green Bay Packers head coach Mike McCarthy said after his team beat the New York Giants, 23-16, in Week 5. McCarthy has been dealing with these questions for the better part of a year now, quite simply because his passing offense has regressed, and everybody knows it. Never did it regress more than last Sunday, when Green Bay’s formerly viciously efficient passing game looked like something out of the Three Stooges in a 30-16 loss to the Dallas Cowboys. 

Aaron Rodgers completed 31 of 42 passes for 294 yards, one touchdown and one interception—not horrible stats, but even a cursory look at the game tape against Dallas shows a passing offense that is broken, and a quarterback in Rodgers who is seeing things that aren’t there, while missing obvious things that are.

It obviously wasn’t supposed to be this way. Rodgers was the toast of the NFL from 2009 through 2014, and he was unquestionably the best quarterback in the NFL when healthy. His prime season was 2011, when he threw 45 touchdown passes to six interceptions, threw touchdowns on nine percent of his pass attempts, completed 68.3 percent of his passes, and averaged an ungodly 9.2 yards per attempt. Passer rating isn’t the ultimate arbiter of quarterback excellence, but Rodgers’ 122.5 passer rating that season was the best in NFL history.

Things really started to change in 2015, when Rodgers’ completion percentage dropped from 65.6 to 60.7, his touchdown percentage fell from 7.3 to 5.4, and his yards per attempt went from 8.4 to 6.7. This season, his completion percentage is 60.2, his touchdown percentage is 5.5, and his yards per attempt is down to 6.5, all in line with the regression.

I’ve written at length about Green Bay’s offensive issues over the last two seasons, and here’s what I believe to be true: McCarthy and his coaches have designed and are implementing an overall offensive game plan that is unsustainable in the modern NFL.

Over time, Rodgers has overcompensated for the things that offense doesn’t provide to the point where it’s broken him as a mechanically consistent player. And when you’re a modern NFL quarterback, mechanical consistency is the most valuable attribute. It’s what allowed Tom Brady to knife up two teams in his return to the NFL from an offseason and a four-game suspension; it’s the common denominator among all truly and consistently great NFL quarterbacks. It’s something Rodgers used to have in spades when his offense was formationally diverse; and now that it isn’t, he’s forced to improvise far too often, which has set him off his mechanics to a disconcerting degree.

McCarthy can go on and on about 400 yards of offense, but that misses the larger point: His future Hall-of-Fame quarterback has been rendered dysfunctional by a limited series of schemes that force him to play outside structure to the point that there is little structure left.

Let’s start with the first play in the Giants game: This winds up as a six-yard completion to Randall Cobb out of the left slot, which seems like a positive result on first-and-10. But if you look to Rodgers’ left at the snap, and watch the progression of the play, something weird happens. The slant/flat concept is a staple of the Packers’ passing game, with one receiver moving to the flat (basically, the screen area), and another running a slant. It’s one of the few route combinations McCarthy consistently calls to create designed openings, and in this instance, Rodgers has Nelson on the slant to the left side for a bigger gain—he’s got linebacker Johnathan Casillas beat, and that favorable matchup happens because slot defender Landon Collins follows tight end Richard Rodgers out to the boundary.

This is a tailor-made opening for Rodgers, and he even looks to his right to start the play…and then, he just doesn’t pull the trigger. He doesn’t trust what he sees, he bails out to his left and he makes a play outside of structure. Again, it’s a completion, but it points to a larger issue: Rodgers appears to be operating under the belief that he must transcend a faulty offense with his own impressive physical attributes. It’s clear that the slant/flat comprises …

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