Packers cornerback Trevon Diggs said before playing the Bears that he was ready to contribute despite being a new arrival in Green Bay. He didn’t contribute much in the Packers’ playoff loss.
Diggs only played one snap in the game against the Bears, on the first possession of the game. On that one snap, a third-and-8, the Bears completed a short pass to Luther Burden, who picked up a first down while running behind a block from D.J. Moore, who knocked Diggs onto his back.
It was not an impressive play from Diggs, and the fact that the Packers never put him on the field again the rest of the game — even though there was no indication he was injured, and even as Caleb Williams was completing passes all over the field during a fourth-quarter comeback — suggests that the Packers didn’t have much confidence in Diggs’ ability to contribute.
Diggs is under contract to the Packers for 2026, but his salary cap hit is $15 million and none of his pay is guaranteed, so it’s safe to say he’ll be released. Diggs is only 27 years old and once looked like he was becoming an elite cornerback, but he tore his ACL early in the 2023 season and hasn’t been the same player since. He’ll likely be competing just to make a roster somewhere this summer.
Packers Clips
Packers defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley has completed an interview with the Dolphins for their head coaching vacancy.
The Dolphins announced the interview wrapped up on Wednesday afternoon. It is the third interview that the Dolphins have announced since firing Mike McDaniel last week.
Hafley has spent the last two seasons running the defense for Green Bay. New Dolphins General Manager Jon-Eric Sullivan was the Packers’ vice president of player personnel before being hired in Miami last week.
Hafley’s name has come up in a number of head coaching searches around the league and he has interviewed with the Titans. Former Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski and Seahawks offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak have also interviewed with the Dolphins.
Until the Packers announce that coach Matt LaFleur definitely will be back in 2026, there’s a chance he won’t be.
While most teams have no reason after the end of a given season to state the obvious, there’s currently nothing obvious about LaFleur’s future in Green Bay.
On Wednesday’s PFT Live, we pointed out the possibility that the Packers want to see whether someone will contact them with interest in making a deal for LaFleur. And while LaFleur would have to be willing to participate in the two-step process (new team makes a deal with the Packers, new team makes a deal with LaFleur), it may be his only alternative to accepting an extension he doesn’t like or coaching the final year of his current deal.
Appearing on ESPN Milwaukee earlier today, ESPN’s Adam Schefter characterized LaFleur’s status as “up in the air.” (Aaron Rodgers is gonna be upset.) Schefter explained that, if an extension isn’t finalized, it’s possible that some other team will call the Packers about possibly hiring LaFleur.
Regardless of the procedure that applies in situations like this, the reality is that there will be plenty of back-channel communications regarding, for example, whether LaFleur would be interested in one or more of the various vacancies and what it would take to hire him.
Again, all of this ends the moment the Packers declare LaFleur will be the coach in 2026. Until that occurs, anything can happen.
In picking Packers-Bears for Prime Video, the NFL knew exactly what it was doing.
The best matchup of the wild-card round became the most exciting of the six games, too. That propelled the contest to an all-time streaming record, with 31.61 million viewers.
The number represents a 43-percent bump over last year’s Prime Video playoff game between the Steelers and the Ravens, which averaged 22.07 million viewers. It also broke the streaming record set by the Netflix Lions-Vikings game on Christmas Day, with 27.52 million.
The streaming high-water mark comes at a perfect time for the NFL. Amazon, as we understand it, will have to re-bid on the game next year. And the massive number for the latest game makes the property even more valuable going forward.
Which would explain the NFL’s decision to handpick the best game of the wild-card slate for a streaming-only broadcast.
And, yes, people still huff and puff about streaming only games. As long as the numbers blow the house down, the pivot to streaming will become more and more permanent.
During a post-game press conference following Monday night’s playoff loss to the Texans, Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers delivered a rant regarding the perceived presence of now-former Steelers coach Mike Tomlin and current Packers head coach Matt LaFleur on the hot seat.
Rodgers’s hot-seat remarks may have shattered some of the lingering ice between Rodgers and LaFleur.
“I’m speechless,” LaFleur told Mike Silver of TheAthletic.com via text message. “He didn’t have to do that, but he did. [It’s] one of the nicest compliments [of] my life. I’m so appreciative of him for that.”
LaFleur coaches Rodgers for four seasons in Green Bay, guiding him to a pair of league MVP awards. By the time Rodgers was traded to the Jets in 2023, the relationship between LaFleur and Rodgers was strained, at best.
“I mean, this league has changed a lot in my 21 years,” Rodgers told reporters on Monday night. “You know, when you hear a conversation about the Mike Tomlins of the world, Matt LaFleurs of the world, those are just two that I played for, and when I first got in the league, there wouldn’t be conversation about whether those guys were on the ‘hot seat,’ you know, but the way that the league is covered now and the way that there’s snap decisions and the validity given to the, you know, the Twitter experts and all the, you know, experts on TV now who make it seem like they know what the hell they’re talking about, to me that’s an absolute joke.
“And for either of those two guys to be on the hot seat is really apropos of where we’re at as a society and a league, because obviously Matt’s done a lot of great things in Green Bay, and we had a lot of success. Mike T, he’s had more success than damn near anybody in the league, you know, for the last 19, 20 years. And more than that, though, when you have the right guy and the culture’s right, you don’t think about making a change. But there’s a lot of pressure that comes from the outside, and obviously that sways decisions from time to time, but it’s not how I would do things and not how the league used to be.”
The reality is simple. The beast that has helped Rodgers make nearly $400 million during his career has created an appetite for non-stop coverage, reporting, and analysis. And fans of the bad teams expect them to try to change. If owners feel compelled to make changes in order to keep making the kind of money needed to pay the salaries of players like Rodgers, that’s their decision.
Folks in the media are merely trying to figure out not where the pink slips are but where the pink slips are going. Owners who think it’s ridiculous for their coaches to be regarded as being in jeopardy by those paid to cover the league can issue a statement to the contrary, if they want.
In Green Bay, June comments from new Packers CEO Ed Policy created the impression that 2025 would be an up-or-out year for LaFleur. Even now, three days after a postseason collapse against the Bears, the Packers have not said that LaFleur definitely will be back for 2026.
As to Tomlin, the prevailing view by the time the playoffs rolled around was that Tomlin wouldn’t be fired, and that he’d be gone only if he chose to be. (Which is exactly what happened.)
Rodgers’s take was, frankly, erroneous. It’s not the media’s fault that coaches are viewed to be on the hot seat. It’s our job to try to figure out where the inevitable openings (so far this year, nine of 32) will be. And if the NFL’s owners are sufficiently wishy-washy to make firing decisions based on comments from “Twitter experts and all the experts on TV now who make it seem like they know what the hell they’re talking about,” that’s the thing Rodgers should be whining about.
Packers defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley is set for his first head coaching interview of the year.
Tom Pelissero of NFL Media reports that Hafley is going to interview with the Titans on Tuesday. Hafley is expected to remain busy over the rest of the week.
The Cardinals, Dolphins, Falcons, and Raiders have also requested interviews with Hafley as part of their head coaching searches.
Hafley has spent the last two seasons with the Packers and he has previous head coaching experience at Boston College.
The Titans interviewed seven other candidates last week and they are expected to spend time with Mike McDaniel, Brian Daboll and Jonathan Gannon in the coming days.
Packers tight end Tucker Kraft was in the middle of a breakout season when he suffered a torn ACL during the club’s Week 9 loss to the Panthers.
He had just caught seven passes for 143 yards with a pair of touchdowns in the team’s Week 8 win over Pittsburgh, setting career-highs in the first two categories.
But then Kraft’s injury struck, prematurely ending his third season.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Kraft said he’s hopeful that he’ll be able to play by the start of the regular season in September.
“Hopefully bulletproof by then,” Kraft said, via Pete Dougherty of the Green Bay Press-Gazette. “So I already feel pretty good. My progress so far has been great. Some would say even ahead of schedule. So not trying to blow anything out of proportion. I’m only not even 10 weeks in yet, but it’s feeling good so far.”
Kraft had been displaying how good he could be throughout the season and wants that to continue when he’s back on the field next fall.
“I was able to prove time and time again what I could do with three catches, four catches, five catches,” Kraft said, “showing like in that Pittsburgh game, I had 140-something yards, with like 90 percent of that coming from the yards after the catch.
“So now, coming off my injury, putting myself in position to get better at things like I was – I was really feeling my man separation coming along – getting the same reps and not making the same mistakes, but continuing to improve upon each opportunity. So that moving forward, I do feel like as a tight end, I am the full package, and that I can be anything for this team, just put the ball in my hands.”
Coaches don’t want to see their quarterbacks throw interceptions. Usually. But Bears coach Ben Johnson didn’t mind an interception Caleb Williams threw on Saturday.
With the Bears facing fourth-and-6 at the Packers’ 40-yard line, Williams threw a deep ball for wide receiver Luther Burden. Packers cornerback Carrington Valentine had Burden covered, and if Valentine had just knocked the ball down, it would have been a good play for the Packers.
Instead, Valentine made a diving interception, where Burden touched him down at the 13-yard line. Valentine got up celebrating the interception, but he had actually made a bad play, costing his team 27 yards of field position.
Johnson said today that while he needs Williams and Burden to make sure they’re on the same page about that route going forward, he had no complaints about the result.
“Actually, that was one of the better interceptions you could have, to be honest with you,” Johnson said. “If you’re not going to convert a fourth down, then flipping the field like that is a big deal. There was a miscommunication on that play, and it’s one that we’re fixing.”
Johnson’s comments are a reminder that defensive players should be aware of the game situation and not intercept a pass on fourth down if they’re not going to be able to return it past the line of scrimmage. The Bears would have preferred a completion, but an interception was better than an incompletion.
Despite Saturday’s loss to the Bears, it looks like the Packers are still likely to retain head coach Matt LaFleur.
That will be good news to edge rusher Micah Parsons, who offered a strong endorsement of LaFleur when speaking to reporters during Green Bay’s locker room cleanout on Monday.
“I’ve had my fair share of coaches and people around this league that I’ve been around, and Matt is one of the best guys — and people, as a person — I’ve been around since I’ve been in this league,” Parsons said Monday, via Rob Demovsky of ESPN. “I reached out to him when I started seeing this [stuff about a coaching change] and I said, man, when I agreed to come here, you were part of the reason why I came here. I want you [to be] a part of this, and I love you, and I think you’re a great coach. He appreciated those words and we had a brief conversation.
“But Matt, I think he’s a great guy. And I just think he cares so much — he cares so much about the players. I don’t think people realize that. And you can get spoiled with good coaching and good people, and you don’t realize until they’re going. And I don’t want to be at that point where we realize like, damn, we let such a great coach go.”
Furthermore, while Parsons wasn’t playing in the wild card loss to the Bears due to his torn ACL, the edge rusher said players have to take accountability for the outcome.
“[Y]ou talk about do your job, right? You talk about coach, I mean this team put up … 27 points? In a playoff game, I’ve always told you, if my team puts up 21 points, we should win that game,” Parsons said. “We put up 27 points and we missed six, seven on special teams. That’s 34 points, and you’re talking about you want to get rid of a coach.
“At one point, players have to have accountability. And that’s something that I’m challenging us as players that we need to take. We need to have accountability. How do we let that game go? Like, coaching can only do so much. It’s about timeouts and Xs and Os — great. Sometimes, it’s about playing football at the same time.”
While the Packers are reportedly trying to work out a deal, there’s no guarantee those talks won’t break down. We’ll see if LaFleur will get another shot with Green Bay in 2026 or if Parsons will have to get used to another head coach.
Packers right tackle Zach Tom missed the final four games of the team’s season and his offseason will include surgery to repair the knee injury that kept him off the field.
Tom told reporters at the team’s facility on Monday that he suffered a partial tear to his patellar tendon in the team’s Week 14 loss to the Packers. That was a particularly painful day for the Packers as defensive end Micah Parsons also tore his ACL that Sunday.
It will be an extended recovery time for Tom, although probably not as long as the one that Parson faces heading into next season. Tom will likely be shooting for a return to action during training camp.
Defensive tackle Devonte Wyatt, center Elgton Jenkins, and tight end Tucker Kraft will also be in rehab mode over the coming weeks and months. Getting all five players back to top form would be a good way for the Packers to avoid another early exit in the postseason next year.
