#771 Packers Unscripted: Offseason on offense

assistant coaches, the coordinators, and the position coaches. We heard from offensive defensive coordinator Adam Stenovich Jeff Hafley on Monday. We heard from the offensive assistance on Wednesday. Later today, after we are done taping this show, we will hear from the defensive assistance, and we may have more to talk about them next week because there are several new faces in that box that we haven't gotten to know yet.

But I'll just toss that toss this out to you as an open ended thing from the first couple of days of assistant coach availability, any particular coach or message or thought thread that stands out to you in terms of what we've heard from those who are working with the players here during offseason workouts.

already offensive coordinator at that point. But the way he dives into it and makes it really digestible in what, you know, kind of identifying not just the some open ended platitudes about Jordan Love, but really going into why he improved through the course of last season. And he brought up that statistic Mike about you know, they go back and look at this film in these cutups, and they can bring break down the percentages of how many times he rolls out, how many times he extends a play,

is he running, is he passing? Whears his eyes And he said, you know, he used the ninety five percent analogy that when he was breaking the pocket the first half of the season, ninety five percent of the time he was using his legs. But as the season went on, they worked through some of the fundamentals of that he's looking downfield more and creating more big plays for his receivers.

It's always going to be a balance, Certainly, somebody with Love's athleticism and four to seven speed, you're going to

want to be able to use your legs. But when you and I have broken down and looked at all these things and talked so many times about the run that Jordan Love got on in the second half of the season, I think sometimes me personally, I won't speak for you, but you lose sight of well, this is a twenty five, twenty four into twenty five year old quarterback who's also making week to week progress as well.

it's about the entire offense. And we heard from him a lot last year and then again this week about how it wasn't just about Jordan's progress that made the offense go It was all of these young receivers and tight ends, and there was the shuffling going on on the offensive line and young players playing key spots on the offensive line that needed to sort of get their legs under them, and as you know, the route running got crispered, the decisions on choice routes, the reading of coverages.

You know, it's not just Jordan Love who's reading the coverages. It's the guys running the routes who are reading the coverages too. And that's you know, the cliches of you know, guys getting on the same page, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, we hear those phrases a lot, and they are cliches, but as I like to say, they're cliches because they're true. They they really, they really do reflect what has to go on out there for things to click. And I'm

with you. I enjoy listening to h I enjoy listening to Tom Clements talk about how an entire offense works together. And obviously he's been an offensive coordinator in this league as well. He hasn't just been a quarterbacks coach, but he's a darn good quarterbacks coach. And you get the sense even though Tom has you know, he's got a very dry sense of humor. He's always very business like

up there at the podium. But you get the sense that even though as long as he has been in this business, and he's sort of retired a couple of times and come back, but with Jordan Love and these young guys on offense, he seems to be having a lot of fun.

I mean, this guy's resume goes back so far. It doesn't matter if it's Aaron Rodgers or a Matt Flynn or an offensive rookie of the year, just the guy that's trying to make his way in the National Football League and earn some paychecks as a backup quarterback. Clements's job is to make sure that he prepares all these dudes. So not only just having Jordan Love now, but now

he gets to work with Sean Clifford. Now they added a rookie seventh round pick and Michael Pratt, and now with Sean Mannon going into that room of you know, a veteran quarterback that just recently hung up his cleats and is now looking to get into the coaching realm. These are all people that Clements can touch and can help kind of pass along some of his wisdom. The funniest moment Matt Schneidman from the Athletic mentioning to him,

you know you're seven years old. You could be on a beach so with your feet up, and then Clements, as you mentioned his dry sense of humor, right equipping back, well, I can still have my feet up here too. I don't know, it is a dry sense of humor. I don't know if there's anyone funnier maybe in this building pound for pound in Tom clements. He was an excellent lawyer.

He's a brilliant quarterbacks coach. I think the guy could have been one heck of a comedian too, if you wanted to go down that route, probably like a Mitch Hedberg type.

of a quarterback in his own right. No, he did not make it big in the NFL, but you're talking about a former Notre Dame quarterback who nearly won a Heisman Trophy and then one, multiple championships in the Canadian Football League, multiple great Canada. He was a league he was a league MVP in the CFL, this guy. He knew how to play the game when he was playing it, and he sure as heck knows how to coach it, especially at that position.

Packers dot com. It was after hearing from offensive coordinator Adam Stenovich and some other offensive assistants have followed up on it, but just talking about and it's sort of stemmed from some comments Matt Lafleur made after the draft about where they are in the off season program with the veterans and sort of building the offense, building the playbook for twenty twenty four and just how different everything is this year compared to a year ago, not only

because Jordan Love has a year under his belt and they have, you know, nineteen games including playoffs of all of the film of Jordan Love running the offense, seeing what he does well, what he doesn't maybe do quite

so well. But it's about the offensive coaches knowing what they have, Whereas a year ago it was like, Okay, they knew they were going to have Christian Watson and Romeo Dobbs, and they were gonna have Aaron Jones and aj Dillon in the backfield, but they didn't really know much else because they hear, you know, after the draft.

Suddenly you bring in Jaden Reid and Dontavian Wicks and Luke Musgrave and Tucker Craft and so then you're sort of, you know, getting a late start in piecing this all together. And then of course, even when you get into the games, you're still trying to figure out, what do these guys do well, what should we be emphasizing to try to put the players in the best position to make some things happen. Out there, and so that was all part

of the evolution in twenty twenty three. Well, now they're starting at a completely different point in twenty twenty four in terms of building the offense, you know, the playbook and the adjustments because they know Wes that there's going to be you know, the cat and mouse game with regard to Jordan Love, and this Packers offense is going to start in Week one in Brazil against the Philadelphia Eagles.

Because all of the Packers' opponents now they're gonna be They're gonna be studying the Dallas game, They're gonna be studying that late game, late season game at Minnesota. They're gonna be studying these games where the Packers offense looked, you know, like in a completely different place compared to September and October. So you're gonna have to have the counters to those punches that defenses are gonna throw at you.

And that's what the Packers' coaching staff is working on now is to okay, what are the variations of the different concepts. What can we can line up like this and they're gonna think that we're running this, but we can run something else out of it. Instead emphasizing our players' strengths along the way. That's where this all is now compared to a year ago when the offense was was such a great unknown.

you have Christian Watson dealing with the hamstring injury. Romeo Dobbs was injured at the beginning of training camp, although he ended up getting through that okay, And it ends up having to be a lot of young guys that you were not expecting. So not only does this allow those guys to take this offense in at a more comfortable pace, it also opens the door to figure out, Okay, now we saw briefly what bo Melton can do. What

could he potentially add to our offense. Is a more consistent piece I don't would never say it's a positive that Aaron Jones is not on this roster. But now you have Josh Jacobs that's now an unknown for opponents. How do the Packers plan to utilize Josh Jacobs. They're talking about using a more as a pass catcher, maybe getting him more involved in the red zone than he was during this time with the Raiders in terms of

his pass catching ability. Those that explosion of offensive options I think is gonna be what's ultimately gonna be Jordan Love's best friend now in his second year as a starter, because it's not just the packages and Okay, well we're gonna go two tight ends here and we're gonna go eleven personnel here, and no, it's about, okay, what are the personnel within those packages? And that's depending on how the Packers want to flip it and depending on if

guys are healthy. That's where things get really interesting.

graduate level details of a scheme, right that you know, it's it's not freshman composition anymore. Like you know, you're you're working towards that master's degree in the offense. And what I liked about that is not only not only was it a description of of the progression in terms of in terms of you know, mentally grasping everything, but it's still a reference to you know, you're always you're

always still in school, You're always learning. Nobody, you know, nobody ever or ever necessarily gets completely out of that except maybe in Aaron Rodgers after fifteen years as a story,

then he's writing his own course right exactly exactly. But but what the Packers got to last year offensively, with all of the playing time that these young guys got, and not just the draft picks, but the guys like Bo Melton that you mentioned, you know, getting in and making a big impact late in the season, is they got a whole bunch of young guys that progressed really quickly through the undergrad stages and now at a young age in the NFL, they're getting into some of the

graduate level details of what Matt le Fleur and this offensive staff want to be able to do schematically, along with the growth in the quarterback and being able to put potentially even more on Jordan Love's plate in year two as a starter compared to year one.

there about you know, my money touches your money. Yeah, and I think that is where I look at this offense too. Yeah, you want to see a thousand yard receiver receiver, you want to see a ten touchdown tight end, but it's about how does what Jaden Reid does how can that compliment Christian Watson if he's healthy and on the field. You know what Romeo Dobbs early in the season, as Rabel said, you know, he had seven touchdowns early in the season in the red zone. Teams were doubling

him and that created opportunities for others as well. For as much as we saw last year there was points where because of injury, Bo Melton needed to be the go to option for this offense. Well, now if you have more of those guys available, And again, we don't live in a perfect world where no one's going to be injured, but you would hope from the Packers' perspective, it won't get to the dire straits that it did

at some points last season. And now we can see Tucker Craft and Luke Musgrave out there together, We can see all these different combinations of players sort of working together. If that can be achieved within this offense, and the unselfish nature of Jordan Love and the way they built things last year, I felt like that was part of

the secret sauce. I know the leading receiver had seven hundred and ninety three yards or whatever it was, but it was how many different guys were involved in this thing. And then when you take on a team like the Dallas Cowboys who want to really send pressure and they want to get in your face, well that's opening up a lot of one on one opportunities for those type of players to make their plays. Yeah.

playoff game over Dallas. And you still you get the sense that as much as as much as that can obviously help open things up for other guys, but a game like that on that big stage could also be a big springboard for a guy like Romeo Dobbs to take his game to the next level as well. Because I don't know about you, and you know Romeo's Romeo is a quiet, humble guy. He gets interviewed a lot in the locker room, even though he may not necessarily enjoy it all the time. But I've always gotten the

sense in talking to him. He doesn't necessarily like to talk about himself, but I've always gotten the sense that he's always felt, even when he's been productive, that he could always potentially do more, that there's more out there

for him. Then when he goes out there on the playoff stage and has a game like he had in Dallas, you just wonder if a performance like that in that kind of environment, with those kind of stakes in the NFL for a young receiver in his career, what does that mean in terms of a springboard later on?

on this team have showed that understand the opportunity before them. Now, this was probably more a product of us talking to Kenny Clark and some of the guys at the tailgate tour, but you know, they understand that Brian Goudikuns kind of hit it out of the park the last two drafts. They knew that the way Matt Lafleur and this coaching staff developed players that they were getting uncommon production from rookies, first year, second year players. As that door opens, so

too does a massive opportunity to chase a championship. The Packers are being careful. They don't want they want to keep expectations down, you know, they don't want to They don't want to make this thing bigger than it is. But there is that opportunity there and for young guys showing that maturity to understand, Okay, I'm going to play ten years in the league. I'm gonna have five cracks at a super Bowl. No, it's not like that.

open as long as possible. You want to have a run of sustained success to get as many cracks at the playoffs as you can for that year that maybe it finally all comes together and you go and win a championship. So there's that's the perspective from the personnel side of things. The players themselves look at it as, yeah, the opportunity is right in front of us. It's all about right now, you know. And and you know, the personnel staff that is trying to build the roster, they

can't go out there and win the games. They can. They do the best they can to put the most competitive team on the field that they can. It's up to the players, the guys to go out there and win the games. And as you said, they sense the opportunity that's here. As competitive as this this Packers team can be, and as far as they got last year, and as well as they were playing at the end of the season, the opportunity is. The opportunity is definitely there.

And these guys, these guys aren't looking at it as oh, yeah, like you know, we'll figure it out one of these years. That's how That's not how the players. That's not how the players operate. That's not their mindset.

left go. And it also tells you that these guys who have been around here have been making the football team in more more often than not, have been making big contributions. Everybody wants to you know, the Ron Wolf thing. You want to go up a few Draft ten players, you want three to be starters. You know, the batting average idea. But Michael, you know this. Paul Mallidor went on a hit streak once. I mean, like, if you can bat seven hundred for a stretch, yeah, and the

long enough timeline, it might work itself back down. But when you're hot, you want to stay hot. And I just feel like, again, we'll let this new draft class come in and perform and see what they can add to this thing. But it's such a massive opportunity that the Packers have right now, and I think everybody understands that, whether you want a verbalizer or not, obviously you want to keep this thing chill for players. You want them

to focus on what's in front of them. What happened at the end of last season does not guarantee that it will happen again at the beginning of this season.

with your favorite sub or sub in a bowl. Cousin Subs fifty plus years of better run through a couple of sort of house cleaning items. First off, a lot of folks wondering, Okay, so the draft is done, Rookie Mini camp has done. What is the rest of the offseason schedule at this point? Because we're talking about the players being around, the coaches are around. So this week after the Rookie minute, right after the Rookie mini camp, the rookies are actually off then the players are players

are going through their offseason workouts. They're doing you know, position work with their coaches, et cetera. Next week the rookies then join the veterans for those offseason workouts, and then the week after that is the start of OTAs, which is really the first time in the off season program where you can have eleven on eleven reps. You can have you can have the offense and the defense

out there. It's still pads, you know, non contact and whatnot, but you can actually run, you know, run eleven on eleven sort of, you know, scrimmage stuff in shorts and helmets. So you get three weeks of OTAs. The way things have worked media wise in the past, one OTA per week is open to the media and then we get access to the locker room to do interviews, so as we get closer to the end of May, we'll be able to reconnect with the veteran players see some of

these OTA workouts. And then in the middle of June you have the mandatory mini camp, which for the packers is scheduled from June eleven to June thirteen. And then when the mandatory mini camp is over, then that's essentially the end of the off season program and then you have the big break before everybody comes back for training camp and I hit the bar late July, yeah, or other places finding places to put our feet up, like

Tom Clements. The other thing we are hearing, not making any declarations by any means, but we are hearing that it sounds like the NFL is going to be releasing the twenty twenty four schedule next week sometime. So maybe on one of our shows next week, we'll have a chance to talk about the twenty twenty four schedule beyond Week one in Brazil and just how this whole, uh,

this whole slate is going to line up. I know, your big ask of the NFL big as before the Brazil game was announced, was can Matt Lafleur please open a Packer season at home in Week one? Well that didn't happen because because we're headed to Brazil in early September. So beyond that wild way, yeah, I know, ye're six, I know, six, sixth year as a head coach and he has yet to have a home game in Week one at Lambeau.

Four years in a row, we've either been traveling on Christmas or it's been Christmas Eve that we've played. Yeah, something like no Christmas game would be good, but but hey.

So whatever whatever teams end up playing on Christmas, with Christmas being on a Wednesday this year in the NFL saying that that there will be games scheduled on that day, that's just gonna be a weird deal. Like, and I'm hoping it's not us.

is a must under no circumstances. Can there be a schedule out of the nine hundred nine ninety five thousand different machinations of these calculations they come up with for schedules if they go back to back road games after Brazil.

It just it's been all over the map. If you could just get a little bit more parody with it, no huge weird swings home games, road games, I feel like that could be something that could help this football.

the two favorites for the NFC North. If the NFL wants to put the Packers and Lions in Week eighteen, put it at Lambo not at Ford Field, please, Yeah, that'd be really cool. That works for me.

for the years. So yeah, it's been nine years. The Brett Favre number retirement thing was on that rainy Thanksgiving night at Lambo against Chicago. So anyway, it's.

So keep an eye out for for those draft pick follow up stories as we head the rest of this week and into next week. And then maybe we're going to find out about that schedule for twenty twenty four.