It’s the bye week. So let’s take a moment and go back in time to what is still the biggest single moment so far this season. Early in the second preseason game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Jordy Nelson went down with a dreaded non-contact injury. He tore his ACL and was out for the season.
Aaron Rodgers was quoted after the game as saying that it was especially tough losing Jordy in a “meaningless” game. That fit well into the narrative against the preseason that the media was hawking and thus the rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth over the preseason was on.
Let’s bottom-line this. There are two reasons why people bitch about the preseason every year: injuries and the full price of the tickets. That’s it. The very notion that the games themselves are “meaningless” or unnecessary is ludicrous.
Every other major sport plays a month of exhibition games or more before kicking off their season. And none of those sports require the timing or teamwork that football requires. Football not only involves 11 guys working together at the same time, but it also involves the thickest rulebook and, by double, the largest roster. If any sport requires an exhibition season to prevent looking like garbage for the first month of the regular season, it is football.
I understand where Rodgers is coming from. It is a big emotional blow to lose a key player like Jordy, and it DOES feel worse when it happens in a game that he didn’t need to play in. Technically, however, as I uncovered when I researched the Packers’ injury woes during Mike McCarthy’s tenure, teams are definitely better off losing a player in the preseason than during the season.
Just by looking at the Packers’ injury history and seasonal success, I found that the correlation between injuries and team success wasn’t how many players were put on the IR, but WHEN they were put there. The number of players put on IR from training camp and preseason injuries had no apparent affect on the team’s success that year. However, the number of players put on IR midseason had a direct affect on the team’s success. The two seasons when the Packers put the fewest players on the IR midseason were the two most successful regular seasons during McCarthy’s tenure. In 2007, the Packers had just four season-ending injuries during the season and went 13-3. In 2011, the Packers repeated that feat and went 15-1.
Losing Nelson in the second preseason game allowed the Packers to adjust their offense to his absence. It allowed Rodgers time to build some chemistry and trust with the guys who could potentially make up for Nelson’s loss. Unfortunately, that is something that we are still regularly hearing about today. Rodgers needs time to develop chemistry and trust with his other receivers.
Why isn’t Jeff Janis playing a bigger role? What do Richard Rodgers and Ty Montgomery still need to work on? And Davante Adams and Rodgers weren’t exactly firing on all cylinders at the start of the season either. Well, gee, sounds like it might have helped to work on those things before the season, against an actual opponent, in game-like situations, like maybe in an exhibition game or two.
So, Rodgers was right. Jordy Nelson didn’t need to play in that game. It was a meaningless game for him. However, for Rodgers and the newer guys in the passing game, it wasn’t meaningless at all. It was a great opportunity to work on something that would have made the team better during the season. If Rodgers could have foreseen that Adams and Cobb would both deal with injuries, he probably would have put more time into the preseason, working on it. Hindsight is 20/20, but that is why you don’t pass up the opportunity.
Now, it isn’t necessarily Rodgers’ decision, and it is completely understandable if the coaches don’t want to expose Rodgers too much during the preseason. That’s fine. However, our quarterback and leader shouldn’t be saying the games are meaningless when they aren’t. With every week that goes by and Rodgers continues to hesitate to throw it into coverage for Janis, Montgomery or Rich Rodgers, we see that they aren’t.
Until Rodgers and his pass catchers get on the same page, the Packers offense will continue to struggle. It would have been nice if that page had already been found.