Green Bay is playing without Parsons and Jacobs, and until they are back our model has the Packers under .500
Updated
The Packers we previewed in July had Micah Parsons bending the edge and Josh Jacobs carrying the football. The Packers who walked into Minnesota in Week 1 had neither. Parsons is still working back from the torn ACL he suffered in December and will not play before mid-October. Jacobs is on the commissioner's exempt list with no timetable and a six-game suspension floated as a possible outcome. Green Bay lost 39-22, gave up three touchdown passes to a backup quarterback, and when we re-ran the season with that game and those absences seeded in, the Packers slid from ten wins to eight, an 8-9 finish with a 29 percent playoff chance. This is not the roster we graded in the summer, and the number reflects the roster that is actually playing.
Start with what still works, because the passing game does. Jordan Love threw for 387 yards in Minnesota, and our model now projects him for 4,656 yards and 29 touchdowns behind a passer rating near 102, up from the 4,167 yards we had in July. Christian Watson caught six balls for 147 and two scores in the opener and now projects for 91 catches, 1,531 yards and ten touchdowns, which would be a career year by a distance. Matthew Golden had six for 95 and climbs to 53 catches. Tucker Kraft projects for 60 catches and six scores, Jayden Reed for 62. The offense projects for 359 points, 18th in the league, and that middling total is not the passing game's fault.
It is the running game's. With Jacobs unavailable the model hands MarShawn Lloyd 190 carries for 481 yards, a shade over two and a half yards a pop, and Chris Brooks another 79 for 249. That is not a ground game. It is a reason to throw on every down, and a team that has to throw on every down behind a line that gave up four sacks in Week 1 is a team that turns it over and stalls in the red zone. When Jacobs comes back the projection changes. Until then this is a one-dimensional offense, and one-dimensional offenses lose the close ones.
The defense is where the two absences do the most damage, because one of them is the best pass rusher on the roster. Our model projects Green Bay allowing 382 points, 22nd in the league, and giving up the 25th-most yards. The front still generates pressure, nearly 46 sacks on the season, seventh-most in football, and the back end still takes the ball away with more than 13 interceptions. Barryn Sorrell projects for nearly nine sacks in the role Parsons was supposed to fill, Lukas Van Ness for seven, Devonte Wyatt for seven inside. Keisean Nixon had a sack and a pick in Minnesota. Those are honest numbers for a good group. They are not the numbers of a defense with the best edge rusher alive on it, and the model knows the difference.
Rashan Gary, Quay Walker and Trevon Diggs are still gone from the group we graded 14th in July, and now the centerpiece who was supposed to cover for those departures is in a knee brace. Carson Wentz threw three touchdowns against this secondary. That is the kind of afternoon a thin back end without a dominant rush in front of it produces, and it will keep producing them until Parsons is on the field.
The division is a gauntlet, and Green Bay is now the third team in it by our numbers. Detroit survived New Orleans and projects for thirteen wins. Chicago scored 59 in Carolina and climbed to nine. Minnesota beat the Packers with a backup quarterback and holds at six. When we ran the rest of the season, Green Bay finished third in the North far more often than second, and the two Detroit games and the return trip against Chicago are the ones that decide whether the Packers are a wild card team or a .500 one.
The market opened Green Bay around ten wins, and in July our model sat right on it. Now we sit two under, and the gap is not a disagreement about the roster. It is a disagreement about how much of the season the roster spends at full strength. If Parsons is back in October and Jacobs is back around the same time, the second half of Green Bay's season looks like the team we previewed in the summer, and a 3-4 or 4-3 start becomes a ten-win finish. If either absence runs long, eight wins is generous.
The path to more is obvious and has a date on it. Love and Watson keep the offense afloat until the reinforcements arrive, the defense holds up well enough in the meantime, and the Packers enter November healthy and angry. The path to less is the Minnesota game becoming a template, a backup quarterback carving up the secondary and a ground game that cannot keep the offense on schedule. Both are live. Our model, weighing the roster that is playing rather than the one that will be, lands at 8-9.
So the read on Green Bay is a very good team missing two of the players that made it very good, with a schedule that does not wait. The talent is still here. The superstar pass rusher is still coming. When we ran the season with both of them out for the stretch they are actually out, the Packers were a .500 team, and we will take that number while telling you exactly which two names would change it.
