Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Packer Plus
Packers hide weaknesses with variety of sets
Editor’s note: This column was published Oct. 1, 1995.
Green Bay — It was six months after Bill Walsh won his first Super Bowl when Sports Illustrated profiled the creative coach of the San Francisco 49ers.
The headline read: “To Baffle and Amaze.”
At the time, Mike Holmgren had just been hired as quarterbacks coach at Brigham Young University. It would be another four years before he joined Walsh’s staff, and then six more years until he became coach of the Green Bay Packers.
All those meetings and practices spent observing Walsh, and perhaps as important, BYU coach LaVell Edwards, coupled with his own inventive mind helped prepare Holmgren for his current task. Namely, how to make chicken salad out of chicken you-know-what with such limited personnel on offense. Walsh amazed.
Holmgren is the one who baffles. Two years ago, Holmgren had a Pro Bowl-level tight end in Jackie Harris and one of the game’s true superstars in Sterling Sharpe.
Today, in addition to the same improving quarterback in Brett Favre, Holmgren has only a developing threat in Robert Brooks.
The Packers are very, very common elsewhere, at wide receiver, tight end, halfback, fullback and in the offensive line. The one man who possesses the talent to make a great catch or outrun a defender, Keith Jackson, has refused to report.
In every sense of the word, Favre has carried this offense in the first month. He is making just enough big plays and avoiding enough bad ones while directing a complex system so that the No. 1rated defense and the invaluable punter, Craig Hentrich, can control field position and decide the outcome of games.
That winning equation, of course, is too tenuous. Starting next week in Dallas and for six consecutive Sundays thereafter, the offense must remain stingy on turnovers, while becoming more explo
sive.
Otherwise, the Packers will be doomed to another 9-7 or even 8-8 finish.
So far, at least, Holmgren has tried to hide the offensive inadequacies with variety and deception in personnel groupings and formations. If Walsh in his era was the leading practitioner of subterfuge, Holmgren is fast becoming a worthy successor in his.
Not in results, mind you, because Walsh won three Super Bowls and Holmgren hasn’t even won a division. The parallel comes rather from the sheer volume of looks that the Packers are giving defenses. In many ways, Holmgren is trying to do it with the proverbial mirrors.
Edgar Bennett, Anthony Morgan and Mark Chmura have been playing hurt. Deep threat Charles Jordan has missed three games. And the best blocker, Ken Ruettgers, sat out the St. Louis defeat and is struggling to regain his form.
Holmgren has always been multiple in approach, but both he and offensive coordinator Sherman Lewis say their array of sets in the first month exceeds past seasons.
In effect, the Packers feel so uneasy about their runners, receivers and line that the objective is never to have the same people on the field for two successive plays.
Last week at Jacksonville, the Packers ran 35 plays with two running backs and 30 with one running back. The two-back looks included 28 from a split backfield, four from the I formation, one from an offset I with the fullback to the weak side and two from a wing-I.
The one-back alignments included 14 with two tight ends and two wide receivers, eight with one tight end and three wide receivers and eight with four wide receivers.
In the first half, the Packers ran 16 firstdown plays. They were in the base proset formation eight times; a double-tightend set five times; a three-wideout, onetight-end set twice and a three-wideout, no-tight-end set once.
Six different players went in motion at Jacksonville, led by Brooks with eight and Bennett with five.
“We think it causes the defense some problems when different groups come in,” Lewis said.
The Packers are running the same base plays that Walsh was in the early 1980s. The major difference is that Walsh almost always had two backs and relied more on downfield passing.
Often when Favre does take a sevenstep drop, his line breaks down. After using 13 deep drops in a lousy game plan against the Rams, Holmgren has called just nine the past three weeks. The results from 22 seven-step drops: six completions for 59 yards, 10 incompletions, three sacks, two interceptions and one scramble are hideous and underline the constraints under which Holmgren the play-caller is operating.
One of the best offensive halves in the Holmgren era occurred at Chicago three weeks ago. Again, the multiplicity of looks was striking.
The tone was set on an opening 14play, 65-yard touchdown drive. There were two backs on the first play, but just one back in eight of the next 13. Holmgren used five different personnel groupings but none more than four times.
Speaking in general about the West Coast offense, Packers defensive coordinator Fritz Shurmur said there was no question that it presented the greatest challenge of any attack he has coached against in 40 years.
“Because there’s so much variety to it,” Shurmur said.
For the month, the Packers ran just 48% of all snaps from their base pro set. They used more than two wideouts 33% of the time and double tight ends 19%.
In the backfield, they employed the two-back set 57% and the one-back 43%.
The negative of mass substitution and ever-shifting formations can be an information overload on players. The Packers have 13 offensive penalties, but still not much more than the nine they had in the first four weeks of ‘92, when the offense was in an embryonic stage.
“It’s a thin line you walk because some of our execution breakdowns are tied to my effort to do some things,” Holmgren said.
At this point, the running game is no more reliable than last year.
Using a 59-41 ratio of pass to run, Holmgren has had more success pulling linemen than asking them to block straight ahead. Thirteen traps have gained 79 yards (6.1 average) and 20 sweeps have gained 77 yards (3.9), but 57 inside runs and draws have gained merely 158 yards (2.8).
Neither the performance of the linemen nor the backs has given Holmgren any reason to call more runs.
In the passing game, Brooks is seeing even more balls per game than Sharpe, Chmura’s average per catch is slightly higher than Harris’ was in 1992-’93, and the running backs aren’t involved as much.
Favre is second in the league in thirddown passing efficiency, and the team leads in third-down conversion rate. Play-action has been almost as ineffective as passes from seven-step drops. Some of the best plays have been on rollouts to the right. Defenses are catching on to the Packers’ screen and bootleg passes.
The 99-yard pass to Brooks in Chicago is the only one longer than 29 yards.
What the Packers do well is control the ball and avoid turnovers. Their scripted first drives have been magnificent, and they have been especially dangerous coming out of sideline discussions after play has been stopped.