Packers Week 1: Stats From Green Bay’s Season-opening Loss

Recently, SumerSports rolled out SumerLive, which tracks a lot of tremendous data live for each game. It’s something I’ve enjoyed clicking around, and I did a test drive for the third preseason game. It seemed to go well, so we’re keeping it rolling into the regular season. Is this a game anyone on this site currently wants to relive? Probably not! But we’re taking a look, anyway.

Offense

As you might expect, the full game numbers aren’t great. Those are mainly due to an absolutely wretched second half. For the game, the Packers posted a negative EPA in both the pass game (-0.07) and run game (-0.37). They posted a 41.3% Success Rate in the passing game and a 33.3% Success Rate in the running game. Not a great showing there.

The first half was good from a passing game perspective, with a +0.39 EPA per Play. Their pass game Success Rate of 36.8% was bad. The difference between those numbers shows an offense that was hitting on some explosive plays, but didn’t have great down-to-down consistency.

Part of that was the pressure. For the game, Brian Flores had the Vikings bringing an insane amount of heat. They blitzed on 73.91% of defensive snaps (50.79% above the NFL average), with a pressure rate of 56.52% (17.97% above the NFL average). For the game, Love had an average time to pressure of 2.3 seconds and an average time to throw of 2.45 seconds. For a bit of perspective on that, Aaron Rodgers was the QB with the fastest time to throw in 2025, and he averaged 2.59 seconds. Love was throwing the ball 0.14 seconds faster and was targeting deep (Love’s Average Depth of Target was 11.35 yards).

Digging into the larger game, the Packers were much more pass-heavy in this game. For the game, they had a pass rate of 68.7%. That holds more-or-less true by half (70.4% pass rate in the 1st half, 67.5% in the 2nd half), but the quarter breakdown is interesting. Here is the pass rate by quarter:

• 1st: 58.3%
• 2nd: 80%
• 3rd: 47.4%
• 4th: 85.7%

That 3rd quarter is the interesting one. Being a bit more balanced in the 1st quarter tracks: you’re in the script so there’s an information-gathering aspect to it. The run wasn’t working, and you like what you’re seeing in the pass game, so you lean into the pass game.

Then the 3rd quarter hits and you think you can try to slow it down and establish the run. The problem is that the running game was bad overall, and that didn’t change in the 3rd quarter. They had an EPA per Play of -0.21 and a Success Rate of 40%.

With the way the Vikings were blitzing, I understand the approach to some extent, but you’re banging your head against the wall a bit.

As far as personnel usage, the Packers were in 11 personnel 47.8% of the time, 12 personnel 31.3% of the time, 13 personnel 14.9% of the time and “Other” 6% of the time (I assume that’s a 6OL package, but I can’t confirm that at the moment). (For the personnel numbering, the first number is the number of running backs on the field, the second number is the number of tight ends on the field and the number of wide receivers is assumed based on there being 5 potential skill position players. So 11 personnel is 1 RB, 1 TE, 3 WR.)

Their run game mix wasn’t all that different than what we saw last year in terms of % of concepts called. They were 52.3% zone, 47.7% man/power. Their Inside Zone run was only called 4 times, but it was their best run by EPA (+0.06 EPA per Play).

Defense

From a personnel perspective, the Packers were split right down the middle: 49.2% Base, 49.2% Nickel, 1.6% Dime.

They were primarily in Zone, with a rate of 83.3%. I mentioned this in my preseason post, but all Zone coverage is not just “drop back and cover this square of grass with your eyes on the QB.” Gannon runs a Quarters-based Match system, which means a lot of his coverages are zone coverages that can look like Man coverage, with the responsibilities of the defenders changing depending on the route distribution. SumerSports tracks the different types of zone coverages and I was able to get that breakdown through their SumerBrain option. Here’s that breakdown of types of zone coverage:

• Cover 3: 32%
• Cover 6: 24%
• Cover 2: 24%
• Cover 4: 20%

The Packers had a blitz rate of 30% and a pressure rate of 40%. Last year, the Cardinals had a blitz rate of 25.1% and a pressure rate of 32.7% with Rich Gannon as the head coach. The pressure game overall was better than I expected, so I’m curious how those numbers will look over the next few weeks.

Albums listened to: Ed O’Brien – Blue Morpho; Spanish Love Songs – Brave Faces Everyone