For Faster Tempo, Offense Must (Wrist)Band Together

The Packers led the league in delay-of-game penalties, a byproduct of two factors. How will they play faster?

GREEN BAY, Wis. – One unwelcome measure showed just how slow to adjust the Green Bay Packers were to coach Matt LaFleur’s first-year offense.

The Packers were guilty of a league-worst 10 delay-of-game penalties last season. The league average was merely 4.06, according to NFLPenalties.com. In the final years under Mike McCarthy, Green Bay was guilty of seven delays in 2018 and four in 2017. Last year’s 10 infractions were more than in 2013 (league-low one), 2012 (four) and 2011 (three) combined.

Two factors conspired against Green Bay. First is the verbose nature of LaFleur’s play calls. Second is Rodgers’ fondness for diagnosing the defense at the line of scrimmage. Combined, too often the offense seemed stagnated.

As a way to combat that, Rodgers in Week 2 began wearing a wristband for the first time in his career. That likely will continue in Year 2 under LaFleur.

“I don’t foresee a future where I won’t need to wear a wristband,” Rodgers said on Friday. “Obviously, that’s something you’d love to take off at some point, but it really does help. I think it helps both sides. It helps Matt and it helps myself where just being able to have him telling me a number and me read off a card is easier than 12 words from him to me and then 12 words at least once if not twice from me to the guys in the huddle. It allows us to get out of the huddle a little bit quicker and get to the line of scrimmage, because this offense is a lot about checks at the line of scrimmage. It’s run to run, pass to run, run to pass, and I think whatever can help us streamline that tempo is what works best for us.”

It’s not just the delay-of-game penalties. Frequently, the Packers didn’t snap the ball until the final second or seconds of the play clock. After the season, that was something LaFleur said he needed to rectify.

“I do think that the danger of when that clock starts to get low is those defenders are looking up at that thing, too, now and they can kind of tee off,” he said a few days after the NFC Championship Game. “That’s the last thing we want to do. We want to keep the defense off-balance.”

At the time, LaFleur said a key offseason project would be communicating the play so it’s not a “paragraph long.” On Friday, LaFleur said there have been some “tweaks … here and there” but most of the terminology will remain the same. that means, as is the case with the offense as a whole, improvement must come from experience.

“It hasn’t been a ton of shortening of the verbiage,” Rodgers said. “There’s been some changes that are good that make things a little clearer as far as certain plays falling better into certain concepts or families of plays that’s going to help, but this offense is a very wordy offense and I don’t feel like that’s going to change anytime soon.”