Snap Judgments: Week 8
After rethinking about Sunday’s game against the Buffalo Bills, here are three things worth discussing:
1) The Packers are bad, and while no one player is likely to change that, GM Brian Gutekunst nevertheless must do something before the trade deadline on Tuesday. Waving a white flag with nine games left in the season isn’t an option for a team with a soon-to-be 39-year-old quarterback and a bloated cap. Acquiring, let’s say, Chase Claypool wouldn’t be a panacea for what ails an offense scoring less than 18 points per game, and the Pittsburgh wide receiver obviously wouldn’t help an underachieving defense, but at the very least, he would inject some life into a team that barely has a pulse. Watching the current group of pass catchers has to be as demoralizing to the men in the locker room as it is to every single fan at home. Gutekunst should’ve done something to improve the situation weeks if not months ago, and while it’s probably too late now to make a significant difference, the only way he could screw up the situation worse is by continuing to do nothing.
2) Around this time a year ago, I advocated for firing special teams coordinator Maurice Drayton even though Green Bay was riding high at 7-1. You didn’t have to be Albert Einstein to figure out that he wasn’t capable of doing the job. But head coach Matt LaFleur didn’t have the guts to do what was necessary, and the top-seeded Packers wound up paying the ultimate price when a blocked field goal and punt helped knock them out of the playoffs in the divisional round. Well, Joe Barry is this season’s Drayton. The second-year defensive coordinator is clearly in over his head and needs to go… now. Sure, he’s been more aggressive in recent weeks, but blitzing and playing man coverage only really works if the person in charge knows when to blitz and when to play man coverage. Barry seems to be winging it with no real plan. The only reason the defense isn’t as bad as the special teams were in 2021 is the talent level. As is the case with making a trade, replacing Barry with secondary coach Jerry Gray probably won’t turn the Packers from a sub-.500 team to a Super Bowl contender, but it could make them better, and that should always be the goal of the people in charge.
3) Almost four years ago to the day, Gutekunst unloaded one of Ted Thompson’s first-round mistakes. Ha Ha Clinton-Dix was traded to Washington for a fourth-round pick on October 30, 2018. Perhaps just as importantly, the move rid the Packers of the fifth-year option they foolishly picked up six months earlier. It’s now time for Gutekunst to trade one of his own first-round mistakes, another free safety whose fifth-year option worth nearly $8 million was foolishly picked up in May. Darnell Savage missed three more tackles on Sunday night, and two were complete whiffs. The 25-year-old former Maryland standout epitomizes all that’s wrong with this season’s underachieving defense. He’s soft, unreliable, and makes very few impact plays. Savage hasn’t forced a fumble since 2019, and his last interception was a dozen games ago. If Gutekunst doesn’t have the self-awareness to admit his blunder and move on from Savage, the coaches need to replace him with somebody who, at the very least, can get a runner or receiver to the ground in the open field.
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