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your initial play.”
On those seven plays, Rodgers threw it four times and completed all four for 60 yards and a touchdown.
It is an example of how deceptive LaFleur’s offense can be, but what it also shows is how vital the tight end position is to him and how he has figured out how to get the most out of three guys with very different skill sets.
During LaFleur’s stops around the NFL, starting in Washington where he worked with current NFL head coaches Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay, he has never had a big-name tight end. He made do with the likes of Logan Paulsen in Washington, Jacob Tamme in Atlanta, Tyler Higbee in Los Angeles and Luke Stocker and a young Jonnu Smith in Tennessee.
He has never had a George Kittle or a Travis Kelce.
This season, he has Marcedes Lewis, Robert Tonyan and Jace Sternberger. The professor, the apprentice and the intern.
Together they have given him the ingredients he needs to run a successful offense. Even though none of them is named Kittle, they are a vital part of what makes the LaFleur scheme work. And he wants at least one of them to be a part of every play.
“We’d like to, at all times,” LaFleur said. “I know there’s times where we had both halfbacks with our receivers in the game. But I would say typically we prefer to have a tight end on the field.
“Injuries are a part of this thing. I can think of a few times in Atlanta where we were missing the tight end, where we had to go with ‘10’ (no tight end) personnel.”
It is the use of his tight ends that has mitigated the lack of depth the Packers have at wide receiver and made it so that general manager Brian Gutekunst felt he didn’t need to stock his receiver room. In fact, of his two top offensive rookie contributors, tight end Josiah Deguara had the most impact.
It crushed the coaching staff when Deguara, a Swiss army knife tight end, tore his ACL on a meaningless special teams play at the end of the Atlanta game. The options with him seemed endless given how he was used in the season opener against the Minnesota Vikings.
Since then, Tonyan has emerged as a pass-catching threat and his blocking has improved so much that they trust him to handle a defensive end on both run and pass plays. Tonyan leads the tight ends with 18 catches for 230 yards and five touchdowns. He has dropped just one pass.
It took Tonyan three years to make the transition from receiver to tight end and he finally has shown he can do more than just run routes.
“He’s come a long way as far as being an NFL tight end and learning the intricacies with it,” tight ends coach Justin
Outten said. “And just being involved in all facets of the game at that position, especially with this offense.”
LaFleur likes having a tight end on the field because it always projects the threat of a running play to the defense, causing it to match personnel and honor any run fakes. It’s also a way to make a defense react to the strength of the offense — more skill players to one side — sometimes just before the snap of the ball.
It’s why you see tight ends shift from one side to the other or as with the motion mentioned earlier, motion all the way to the other side of the formation to force the defense to not only reveal its coverage but also shift its position.
“When you take Marcedes or Bobby or Jace or one of those guys and you have him outside, move him inside, cross over, there’s just a lot of communication that has to go on with a defense with that change of strength, whether it’s bouncing the front, shifting the coverage, all those different things,” offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett said. “I think those are things that we’d always like to do.
“To be able to get some kind of an advantage, whether it be an angle, whether it be a change of coverage or who knows. Every week it changes because every team has a little different wrinkle.”
In particular, LaFleur likes having Lewis on the field because everyone knows he’s one of the best blocking tight ends in the game and the defense has to anticipate the Packers are going to run it when he’s on the field.
Even though they don’t throw it to him much (three catches for 31 yards and a touchdown), they do pass it when he’s in the game. And because of his size — 6-6, 257 pounds — it’s almost like having another offensive lineman because he can handle a defensive end on his own if the offensive line wants to double team someone else.
“Our run game definitely looked different when Marcedes wasn’t in the lineup,” LaFleur said of the knee injury that sidelined Lewis against Atlanta. “We used more random open-edge runs where the tight ends weren’t necessarily at the point of attack, or they might not even be on the field.
“We had to do some other stuff.” Tonyan and Sternberger both get used in “cross-sifting” blocks, which is where they line up on one side of the formation and pull to the opposite side to wall off the defensive end. Their agility makes them better options for that kind of block than Lewis.
It’s all part of LaFleur matching the tight ends up with their physical strengths.
Sternberger, who caught his first regular-season touchdown pass last week, rarely was used in-line in college and ran a lot of receiver routes. Tonyan has gotten better at running routes out of a three-point stance. Because they are different body types, they excel at different routes.
So, what LaFleur and his coaches have tried to do is identify routes that fit each of the tight ends’ skills and stick with those. They can come out of many of the different formations LaFleur uses, so predicting when they’re going to run them can be difficult.
“I think that you always try to find out what your guys love doing and try to put them in position,” LaFleur said. “Sternberger and Bobby Tonyan, they don’t necessarily have the same route tree.
“One guy we might ask to run a certain route and the other guy we’re not going to. We’re going to continue to work on those routes, but until we feel comfortable and confident that they can do that route, we’re not going to put them in that spot.”
Of course, LaFleur would love to have someone as talented as San Francisco’s Kittle, but those type of guys don’t grow on trees. So, he is using the strengths of the three tight ends he has to get some of what Kittle offers.
“I just think it’s similar to how we look at our receiving corps, where it’s more about the collective, less about one guy,” LaFleur said. “It’s just about what you have and then what are you missing. And so, you’ve got to find that.”
In Lewis, Tonyan and Sternberger, it seems like he’s pretty much covered.