Vikings pressure prevented big-play chances off Packers' play-action game

Last year, Matt LaFleur admitted injuries along the offensive line blunted his desire to call play-action because having Aaron Rodgers turn his back to the defense with questionable blocking presented a sub-optimal trade-off. We saw why on Sunday against the Minnesota Vikings as pressure scuttled some key chances for the Green Bay Packers to create chunk plays on a day when they were otherwise difficult to come by. Some of that was the Vikings defense, some was execution by the Packers front and receivers, and part of the blame falls on the quarterback.

Pro Football Focus charted 9 play-action plays from Week 1 for the Packers offense, or about 24% of dropbacks, just below last year’s 26% figure (though well below the 29% number from 2020). Based on my charting, that’s a few too many, with PFF likely counting RPOs as play-action, but it’s not actually critical for this breakdown.

It wasn’t good and there were a number of reasons for it.

First of all, LaFleur and Co. didn’t even call a play-action concept until the third drive, into the second quarter of the game. For a team that is supposed to use them as a staple of their offense, this comes as a surprise, though perhaps LaFleur’s comments from last year and the persistent injuries along the offensive front this season should have been a heads up for us.

Luckily, the first play worked wonderfully. It was a shotgun set from 21 personnel with two backs on the field. The pre-snap motion looks a lot like an RPO they like to run where they can either hand to the back or throw to the swingman for the screen.

Peter Bukowski @Peter_Bukowski

This is some Matt LaFleur ish. 21 personnel. Jet motion. Play-action (they like to run this as an RPO with the back in motion). Leak the tight end across the formation. More of this.

In this case, they do neither and instead fake the handoff, hoping to influence flow and sneak Robert Tonyan across the field in behind. Tonyan, who looked spry on a pitch count in his first game action since tearing his ACL midseason in 2021, does the rest, turning this into a chunk play.

As noted in the tweet, this has all the hallmarks of LaFleur’s schematic family tree: it’s big personnel, with pre-snap motion, a run fake, and a tight end sneaking out late (ish). Given how much they could, and have, used the RPO this is playing off, they could legitimately call this play once a game or even more.

Most of LaFleur’s run-action concepts are designed to either be short passes to create catch-and-run opportunities, or to manufacture chunks. He’s also smartly built checkdowns into those shot plays so Rodgers can follow the old football cliche of going touchdown to checkdown.