No One Can Escape Blame For The Packers’ Offensive Line Failure

The Packers’ loss to the Vikings came down to an easily foreseeable problem: Brian Flores was going to blitz like a madman, and the Packers’ offensive line was going to struggle to stop him.

Better lines than the Packers have failed to slow Flores’ logical insanity, and don’t get me wrong: when I call him a madman, it’s with reverential respect. He’s doing things nobody else is doing and getting away with it. That deserves to be studied and respected. But the problem is the Packers knew this was coming and were systematically unprepared to counter it.

I don’t use that description lightly, but I really do think this was a systemic failure, top to bottom. It’s not just that the Packers had a weak offensive line or were caught by surprise by Flores, but it’s that they knew this was how the game was going to be played and did virtually nothing to avoid it.

Flores’ approach is, by now, well understood, so I think we can lay that particular point aside for now. They knew it was coming and failed to stop it, simple as.

But the way they tried (ha) to stop it, at least from a personnel perspective, merits further attention. Justis said it’s impossible to overstate how bad the Packers’ offensive line was on Sunday, but I’m going to try.

It starts with Donovan Jennings, a former undrafted free agent now in his third year with the Packers. Originally signed in 2024, Jennings had played a grand total of six offensive snaps for the Packers before starting on Sunday, though that number would probably be higher had he not ended the 2025 season on injured reserve after a throat injury just before the Packers’ Week 18 game against the Vikings.

Matt LaFleur said his decision to start Jennings came down to “time on task.” Jennings, apparently, has played enough at left guard in practice and in the preseason that LaFleur felt comfortable starting him against the most aggressive defensive coordinator in football.

“He’s done a nice job, so I feel like he earned that opportunity,” LaFleur said.

To his point, Jennings may have been the most-prepared left guard, but that’s not saying much. We can’t count practice reps, but according to Pro Football Focus, Jennings had played 162 snaps at left guard across the 2024-26 preseasons and the 2025 regular season. With Aaron Banks out (more on him in a bit!), the only other options at left guard were Anthony Belton (two snaps at left guard in 2025) and 2026 draft pick Jager Burton (82 snaps at left guard this preseason), and it’s true: Jennings had more time on task than either one of those guys. But we’re not talking about a vast gulf here, and given how he performed, I think it’s worth calling LaFleur’s reasoning into question.

Of course, this isn’t the first time the Packers have made a decision to go with a more practiced player over a better option. LaFleur and company made a near-identical situation in 2022, when they started Royce Newman at guard repeatedly despite having the much more promising Zach Bako-Bewele (then known as Zach Tom) waiting in the wings. To my knowledge, LaFleur didn’t specifically outline his reasoning the same way at that time, but it seems comparable enough to essentially be the same; he valued experience over talent, regardless of the fact that the better player was going to take over sooner rather than later. I feel comfortable saying that Donovan Jennings was never going to be the Packers’ future at left guard, but Burton (or Belton, for that matter) might still be. The future has to start at some point, and I’d always rather get to it more quickly.

But making those calls (and related ones) falls on the coaching staff, and there’s reason to be suspect there, too.

Let’s start again with Jennings. He was the crown jewel of the Packers’ 2024 UDFA class, but apparently hasn’t made major strides since then. True, Brian Flores has made fools of better linemen, but development is going to be a big part of any UDFA’s career journey, and Jennings, apparently, hasn’t done much in the way of development.

Who’s to blame for that? It starts with offensive line coach Luke Butkus, who has been in that role since 2022. As a draft and develop team, the Packers’ coaching staff is on the hook for the performance of players they’ve been tasked with developing, and every player who started for the Packers on Sunday, Jennings included, falls into Butkus’ tenure as offensive line coach. That’s some pretty paltry development, across the board, though he should get some credit for Zach Bako-Bewele and Jordan Morgan (such as he is) if we’re going to blame him for Jennings.

Above the player level you have tactics, and Jennings and the rest of the offensive line were done no favors by the Packers’ approach on Sunday. Our Justis Mosqueda went into this at some length on the Frozen Tundra Frequencies’ Repack podcast (and you should check it out), but the short version is that the Packers tried to counter Flores’ blitz packages by doing full-line slides to the right and turning someone loose on Jordan Love’s blindside. That led to a bunch of hits on Love and, overall, a pretty bad afternoon for the offense.

Those tactical calls run the gamut of responsibility, falling on Butkus, offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich, and head coach Matt LaFleur. Take your pick who you’d like to blame the most, or just blame all three equally to the extent you see fit; it adds up to the same conclusion: the Packers’ coaching staff made some bad calls with their bad players on Sunday. 

For my money, most of that blame lands on Matt LaFleur. He hired Luke Butkus and promoted him after promoting Adam Stenavich and is the Packers’ offensive playcaller. Who else could be more responsible? Everything leads back to him.

Well, not precisely everything. The Packers were in this position in the first place because of their personnel. It’s one thing to use your players badly, but it’s another (albeit related) problem to have only bad or untested options, and that’s the situation the Packers found themselves in on Sunday.

The Packers signed Aaron Banks to a massive deal in the spring of 2025, but he’s been injured as often as not and bad during the “not” portions. I don’t know if he’d have been a meaningful upgrade on Sunday.

The Packers’ other non-Jennings options were, as previously mentioned, Anthony Belton and Jager Burton. Belton has been disappointing and positionally homeless (thanks to the coaching staff constantly yanking him around since he arrived, much as they did with Jordan Morgan), so he probably wouldn’t have been a slam dunk upgrade over Jennings, either. And Burton, even if he should be the future, may not have been an upgrade either.

But this is exactly the problem: you signed a bad lineman and have no good options to replace him when he goes down. Brian Gutekunst can’t escape blame for Sunday’s debacle, either.

In summary, what a cavalcade of suck. What a black hole of offensive line ineptitude. What a disaster. 

The Packers offensive line failed at every level. The players were bad, generally. One player was bad, specifically. The coaches failed to develop that player. The coaches also failed to prepare to even give that player (and all four of the other ones) a chance to succeed. And all this was precipitated by a series of failures to put good linemen on the roster.

Systemic failure is the only term that begins to capture what happened, and if the Packers can’t get their system sorted out, this game isn’t going to be an outlier for the rest of the 2026 season.