Packer Central

Packers Lose Lowry to Vikings, Leaving Paper-Thin Defensive Line

Dean Lowry, who signed with the rival Minnesota Vikings on Friday, had a career-high five sacks in 2021 and played in 101 consecutive games.

Bill Huber

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GREEN BAY, Wis. – As they transition out of the Aaron Rodgers era, the Green Bay Packers are a team with many needs.

Defensive line, following the free-agent departures of Jarran Reed to the Seattle Seahawks on Wednesday and Dean Lowry to the rival Minnesota Vikings on Friday, is incomprehensibly thin and perhaps the biggest need of all.

The only players on the roster who have played a regular-season snap are stalwart Kenny Clark, 2022 first-rounder Devonte Wyatt and 2021 fifth-rounder T.J. Slaton. Jonathan Ford, a 2022 seventh-round pick who was inactive all season, and Chris Slayton, a seventh-round pick by the Giants in 2019 who’s never played in a game, make the words “depth” and “chart” seem incompatible.

The Packers surely will target the defensive line early in next month’s draft, and they’ll likely to target the bargain-bin group of veterans after the first waves of free agency are complete.

According to NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero, the Vikings gave Lowry a two-year deal worth $8.5 million.

Was Lowry a great player? No. But he was as reliable as a good pair of slippers.

Until going on injured reserve for the final two games of the season with a calf injury, Lowry played in 101 consecutive games. He played in all but one game as a rookie, then was a perfect 96-of-96 until the injury.

Lowry wasn’t dominant but he provided thousands of steady snaps.

Pro Football Focus has a stat called run stops. Essentially, it measures impact tackles, and it mirrors Green Bay’s win/loss grading system. For instance, a tackle on first-and-10 that holds the play to 3 or fewer yards, a tackle on second down that holds the play to less than half the remaining yardage or a tackle on third down that prevents a first down is a run stop/win. In 2022, Lowry had more run stops Kenny Clark despite playing 63 fewer run-defending snaps.

However, with Reed taking over his role on passing downs, Lowry went from five sacks and 42 pressures in 2021 to a half-sack and 17 pressures in 2022.

A fourth-round pick in 2016, Lowry pocketed $24.4 million from Green Bay over seven seasons.

“It’s going to be a lot of moving pieces and we’ll see what happens with Dean and J. Reed,” Clark said after the season-ending loss to Detroit. “But we’ve got a lot of young guys that’s been stepping up. When Dean got hurt, T.J. stepping into the nose role, he did a tremendous job, just standing in there, plugging things up, making plays. D-Wy, he’s been improving each and every game.

“We’ll have to see what happens and how the coaches see fit what spots they want to put guys, but I’m definitely proud of the progression that T.J. and D-Wyatt had the whole season, J. Ford and all those guys, they’ve been locked in all season and getting better. So, excited about their progression next year.”

The Packers are probably plus-four on compensatory picks, meaning an infusion of late-round talent in 2024. Thus far, they lost Reed to Seattle, receiver Allen Lazard to the New York Jets and tight end Robert Tonyan to the Chicago Bears.

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Bill Huber
BILL HUBER

Bill Huber, who has covered the Green Bay Packers since 2008, is the publisher of Packers On SI, a Sports Illustrated channel. E-mail: packwriter2002@yahoo.com History: Huber took over Packer Central in August 2019. Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillHuberNFL Background: Huber graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he played on the football team, in 1995. He worked in newspapers in Reedsburg, Wisconsin Dells and Shawano before working at The Green Bay News-Chronicle and Green Bay Press-Gazette from 1998 through 2008. With The News-Chronicle, he won several awards for his commentaries and page design. In 2008, he took over as editor of Packer Report Magazine, which was founded by Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke, and PackerReport.com. In 2019, he took over the new Sports Illustrated site Packer Central, which he has grown into one of the largest sites in the Sports Illustrated Media Group.

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