After last Sunday’s 27-10 loss to the Jets, Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers said that the Packers need to “simplify” things on offense because he’s seen people “making simple mistakes on complex plays” during the first six weeks of the season.
On Monday, Packers head coach Matt LaFleur was asked about those comments and said that he wasn’t sure what that means. LaFleur also said that he was more focused on execution and attention to details than simplifying things.
Rodgers got another chance to weigh in during his weekly spot on The Pat McAfee Show and seemed to be more in line with the head coach this time around. Rodgers said that the team’s game plans “are not the most complex things the majority of the time” and that “at the heart of it is execution"of what the team is trying to achieve.
“It doesn’t mean less motions and less checks at the line of scrimmage, it just means, ‘Let’s make sure that these guys can handle what we’re doing.’ It was really an alert for our players,” Rodgers said, via Jason Wilde of Madison.com. “Like, ‘We need to lock in a little bit more and simplify things in our own minds.’ Even the most complex plays can be simplified in our mind to the simple things we have to do on that play, whether it’s a certain step we’ve got to make or body language we’ve got to use on these plays. We’ve just got to be better on the details. That was the real thing I was trying to stress. The details have not been good enough.”
Nothing has been good enough for the Packers so far this season and questions about getting the offense on track are going to continue until they are playing consistently enough to win on a consistent basis. Whether that’s execution, attention to detail or something else, the sooner the Packers can figure it out the better.