Barry Says Packers Could Have Different Coverage Plan vs. Jefferson in Rematch

The Green Bay Packers were destroyed by Vikings star Justin Jefferson in Week 1. Why didn’t defensive coordinator Joe Barry let Jaire Alexander cover Jefferson?

GREEN BAY, Wis. – Did Green Bay Packers defensive coordinator Joe Barry consider matching Jaire Alexander against Vikings star Justin Jefferson on Sunday?

“No,” Barry said on Thursday, though he left open the door for doing it in future matchups.

Barry’s supposedly dominant defense was dissected by Jefferson for nine catches, 184 yards and two touchdowns in Week 1. While Alexander wanted the one-on-one matchup, Barry went with his preferred zone defenses in hopes that the overall talent in Green Bay’s secondary would be enough to slow the indomitable Jefferson.

“Jaire is definitely worthy of that,” Barry said. “I think he’s a type of corner that you can do something like that with, and we will. I’m sure there will be weeks where we want to do that. We think that Jaire Alexander, if not the, he’s one of the best corners in the National Football League. But we feel pretty good about Eric Stokes and Rasul Douglas, as well.”

Barry had one of the highest zone-coverage rates in the NFL last season. It’s how he prefers to line up. In zone, it’s practically impossible to match one cornerback against one receiver if that receiver motions from Point A to Point B, because all the other defensive backs have to move into other zones, as well.

“That’s not a real big challenge for the guy you’re asking to do that, but [it is for] the other 10 people around him,” Barry said.

The alternative is to play man, at least some of the time, and put Alexander on Jefferson, Rasul Douglas on Adam Thielen and Eric Stokes on K.J. Osborn.

“It’s much easier to do if you just say, ‘Hey, this week we’re exclusively going to play man,’” Barry said. “I call it dude coverage. ‘Hey, you’re going to go cover that dude every snap.’ Much easier in man. But in zone, that’s where the challenges lie.”

So, why not just play man? What’s the drawback of relying on his three dudes at corner?

“I don’t think there’s a drawback,” Barry said. “I just think there’s an overall general philosophy of how you play defense, first and foremost. Basically, what you’re going to decide to do that game plan, that week. We are, if you were to classify us, we’re much more of a zone team. But we have many man principles that we can deploy. And the big thing that you guys keep talking about, in traveling a specific player to a specific player, it is much easier to do when you’re exclusively playing man. Where in lies the problem is when you’re playing zone, especially when they move that player all over the place.”

Why didn’t Barry didn’t scrap his plan and let his corners play man? He never did say. Maybe the team spent so much of camp in zone that he didn’t feel good about changing midstream. Still, the Packers made Alexander the highest-paid cornerback in the NFL, re-signed Douglas in free agency and used a first-round pick on Stokes. There’s a lot of talent at corner for Barry to use.

“That’s a luxury we have with not only Ja but Stokesy and Sul,” Barry said. “We have three guys that I’m not afraid to play man coverage at all. We have three corners that can do that. Sometimes, you might have one corner that can go do that, but your other guys are probably, ‘Ehh, I can’t play man.’ We’re in a luxury in that we have a secondary that they can play zone, they can play man, whatever we deploy. We just decided going into that game, we felt really good about all three of them, not just one of them. That was our decision. We’ll learn from it. Maybe we’ll have a different plan next time we see them.”

Barry’s game plan might have been flawed but the execution of it wasn’t good, either. Ultimately, Green Bay’s secondary is too good and too experienced to let premier receivers run through the secondary practically unchallenged.

It was a shocking display considering how that unit made life miserable for Aaron Rodgers all summer and gave the Saints fits for two days of joint practices. How is it possible for a veteran secondary to dominate all summer but get dominated the first time something mattered?

“You’ve got to just go out there and play,” secondary coach Jerry Gray said on Wednesday. “It’s different. We’ve got a different team. I know the expectation of this group is really high, especially coming off from last year. The biggest thing we’ve got to do is we’ve got to go back and match that because nothing is ever the same. You can’t expect it to be the same unless you go out there and you’re producing. That’s the thing we’ve got to keep doing in our group.”

Looking forward, the Packers will host the Chicago Bears on Sunday night before a showdown at the Tom Brady-led Tampa Bay Buccaneers next week. It will be up to Barry and Gray to improve upon the plan and the players to go out and execute it.

“A lot of times when you experience a game like that, the first thing you wonder and hope is, ‘God, was the effort there? Was the physicality there?’ And it was,” Barry said. “We made sure we pointed that out to the guys. There was six or seven really bad plays that, if I had a magic wand, we could go back and change, but the big thing is that we learned from it, we moved on and we’ve had two great days of practice and we’re onto the Bears.”