There can be no doubt: the Green Bay Packers’ 2010 Super Bowl winning team was wracked with injuries. Yet, they kept sending in backups and kept playing championship-level winning football.
Green Bay couldn’t pull off that feat this season. Injuries to players on the current edition of the team may not have been as devastating as in 2010, but they were still severe and crippling. Worst of all, the injuries piled up the highest at the most inconvenient time: the week of the NFC Championship game.
For this past year, I’ve looked at the weekly team injury reports (playoffs included). I tried to omit minor injuries, by only counting those that put a player’s name on the list for at least two consecutive weeks. I included all weeks that the player was no longer playing, even if not listed on the injury report (due to being placed on injured reserve, dropped from the team, etc.) I did not count Jared Abbrederis’ or Chris Banjo’s departures as injury-related.
Here’s the tally:
- Sam Shields – 19 weeks – concussion
- Makinton Dorleant – 16 weeks – hamstring and knee injuries
- Eddie Lacy – 15 weeks – ankle injury
- Damarious Randall – 14 weeks – neck, groin, and foot injuries
- T.J. Lang – 13 weeks – hip, foot, and back injuries
- J.C Tretter – 12 weeks – back and knee injuries
- Randall Cobb – 11 weeks – hamstring and ankle injuries
- Demetri Goodson – 9 weeks – knee injury
- Clay Matthews – 8 weeks – hamstring and shoulder injuries
- Quentin Rollins – 8 weeks – concussion, groin and neck injuries
- Nick Perry – 7 weeks – hand injury
- James Starks – 7 weeks – concussion and knee injury
- Corey Linsley – 7 weeks – hamstring injury
- Jared Cook – 6 weeks – ankle injury
- Aaron Rodgers – 5 weeks – hamstring and calf injuries
- Jeff Janis – 5 weeks – hand and quadriceps injuries
- Jake Ryan – 4 weeks – ankle injury
- Kyler Fackrell – 4 weeks – hamstring injury
- Josh Hawkins – 3 weeks – hamstring injury
- Jordy Nelson – 2 weeks – rib injury
- Joe Thomas – 2 weeks – back injury
In several cases, the players participated in games, but likely had either a reduced number of snaps and/or played at less than their full capacity.
Those mostly-healthy players, the ones listed on injury reports, but not for consecutive weeks, include: Davante Adams, Ty Montgomery, Letroy Guion, Blake Martinez, LaDarius Gunter, Christine Michael, Aaron Ripkowski, Jason Spriggs and Geronimo Allison.
Unless I’m mistaken, players who were starters (at some point in the season) who made it all the way through the playoffs without landing on an injury list are David Bakhtiari, Kenny Clark and Ha Ha Clinton-Dix.
Packers placed on injured reserve or similar status leading up to or during the season include: John Crockett, Makinton Dorleant (twice), Sam Shields, Chris Banjo, Eddie Lacy, Don Jackson, Demetri Goodson, and J. C. Tretter. The 2010 team featured an incredible 15 players who were placed on injured reserve.
Packers’ vs. Falcons’ Injury Counts
Going into the conference championship game against Atlanta, Green Bay’s injury list included these 13: Burnett, Elliott, Janis, Lang, Martinez, Matthews, Michael, Nelson, Perry, Randall, Rollins, Starks, and Tretter.
During the championship game, at least seven key Packers players were injured: Kentrell Brice (on opening kickoff, played only three snaps), Lane Taylor and Micah Hyde in the 2nd quarter, Jake Ryan, T.J. Lang, and Ty Montgomery in the 3rd quarter, and Bryan Bulaga in the final quarter.
Things finally reached the point of absurdity when Bulaga was injured. Defensive lineman Letroy Guion, who says he last played offensive line in high school, replaced him at right tackle for the rest of the game.
For the Falcons game, here are the snap count percentages of several injured Green Bay players: Nelson (75), Hyde (53), Ryan (49), Adams (40), Allison (40), Montgomery (34), Taylor (26), and Rollins (26). In some cases, players lost a handful of snaps in the waning minutes due to the game already being decided, but these low snap counts were mostly injury-related.
I’ve seen one report claiming that the Packers were only 10th worst in games lost due to injury during the 2016 regular season. Even if that is true, with 13 players nursing injuries going into the Atlanta game, and an additional seven players getting hurt during the game, that’s 20 injured players.
Atlanta’s official injury report going into the NFC championship contest consisted of Jonathan Babineau, Gabriel Taylor, Julio Jones, and Keanu Neal. All four players played at least 42% of the offensive or defensive snaps. That Julio Jones guy, in particular, didn’t appear to be greatly diminished.
Most people in the football fraternity consider it wrong to use injuries as an “excuse” for any loss, but injuries go a long way to explaining why the NFC Championship game was so one-sided.