Penalties Have Been Blessing, Curse for Packers

Through three weeks, the Green Bay Packers have been guilty of a lot of penalties but benefited from an insane amount of pass-interference yardage.

GREEN BAY, Wis. – Penalties have been an early theme to the season for the Green Bay Packers, with the officials serving as protagonists and antagonists.

First, the good news:

According to NFLPenalties.com, the Packers have benefited from a league-high 273 yards of penalties. That’s more than the Buffalo Bills, Indianapolis Colts and Philadelphia Eagles combined and twice as many as Thursday night’s opponent, the Detroit Lions.

It hasn’t been quantity – the 20 accepted penalties are in the middle of the pack – but quality.

Green Bay’s offense has benefited from six opponent penalties. That’s the ninth-fewest. However, it’s gained a league-high 164 penalty yards.

Of course, the lion’s share of those came via defensive pass interference. Two defensive PI calls against Atlanta resulted in gains of 44 and 43 yards. Two more on Sunday against New Orleans provided gains of 45 and 22 yards. Those penalties came on back-to-back plays on Green Bay’s first two touchdown drive.

The PI calls of 43, 44 and 45 yards represent three of Green Bay’s four longest gains this season. The 154 yards gained on pass interference are more than double the next team (Dallas, 77). That is more than the bottom 14 in the NFL combined; the rest of the NFC North has gained only 33 yards via pass interference.

Now, the bad news:

The Packers have been their own worst enemy at times. They’ve been assessed 27 penalties, only one less than Carolina’s league-worst total, for 220 yards, also second-worst in the NFL.

Coach Matt LaFleur's Packers have been penalized ... a lot :: Photo by Brett Davis/USA Today Sports Images

Against the Saints, the Packers were guilty of 11 penalties for 90 yards. That includes a holding penalty by Jon Runyan and a false start by Royce Newman on the first two plays of the game, and a false start by Zach Tom to doom a third-and-5 on the second possession. Later, receiver Jayden Reed was flagged for holding on offense.

“You’ll hit a period where all off sudden you’ll have three or four penalties, and it’s like, ‘What’s going on guys?’” offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich said on Monday. “You’ve just got to regroup, you know what I mean? Stay calm, regroup, and focus. We can execute. I know we can execute. It’s just a matter of doing what we’re supposed to do, coming off on the right snap count, things like that.”

Moreover, Jonathan Owens, Kingsley Enagbare and Rasul Douglas were guilty of holding penalties on special teams vs. the Saints. Those, coordinator Rich Bisaccia said, were the byproduct of overzealous blocking and poor fundamentals.

“There’s an officiating element in there, as well,” Bisaccia said. “I think we took a good look at them last night and then we had some conversations with the guys this morning. I thought one was a little off base, to be honest with you. I thought the other two were probably more founded. So, we’ll just do a better job getting our hands inside, try not to get outside the framework of our body, see if we can do a better job that way. But it’s 30 yards we’d love to have back.”

Only two teams have more holding penalties all season than the Packers had on Sunday.

The penalties are outside the norm for a Matt LaFleur-coached team. The Packers were guilty of the seventh-fewest penalties in 2022 and the fewest in 2021.

LaFleur has no tolerance for pre-snap penalties. Other penalties, he thought, were a byproduct of youth and the results would improve through time.

“I’m not in complete panic mode about it yet,” he said. “We’ve just got to continue to stress that and it’s got to get better. It’s got to improve. Because it does make it hard to go out there and execute, specifically on offense, to sustain drives and score points if you’re going backwards.”

During Green Bay’s big fourth-quarter comeback, the only penalties were the holds by Douglas and Enagbare on special teams. While those impacted field position, it at least was first-and-10 when the offense lined up to start those possessions.

“It seemed like we were shooting ourselves in the foot a lot, obviously, with penalties and things like that,” Stenavich said when asked what finally clicked. “It’s pretty hard to execute consistently when that happens. And then, it was a good look in everyone’s eyes. They stuck with it. They stayed together. That was a pretty special moment for our team just coming back like that.”

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In my finest piece of writing, here is a roundup of where the #Packers (and this week's opponent, the Lions) are in the national power rankings.

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— Bill Huber (@BillHuberNFL) September 26, 2023

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