Matt LaFleur’s Green Bay Packers choked their way to a loss against the Chicago Bears in the first round of the playoffs a week ago. It was their second defeat to the Bears in a month. Despite that, the longtime head coach and the Packers have agreed to a multi-year extension. And honestly, why not?
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It is hard to point fingers at LaFleur’s success, the baseline that is. He is 76-40-1 as a head coach since taking over in 2019. However, the postseason results have slowly gone in the wrong direction.
LaFleur reached the NFC Championship Game in each of his first two seasons, then lost in the Divisional Round in two of the next three years, and has now exited in the Wild Card round in back-to-back seasons. That is not exactly the regression you want to see from your team.
Still, the Packers clearly believe in LaFleur, even after another disappointing playoff exit. Packers legend Brett Favre was asked about the situation and whether the extension was the right move. You would have thought Favre was running for office based on how carefully he sat on the fence while responding.
“The most important thing is, I don’t have the inside knowledge. I’m a fairweather fan. I’m watching from a distance,” Favre began on his podcast, 4th & Favre.
“And I don’t think that that certainly qualifies me to make statements about [whether] should they fire him or should they have re-upped his contract and all that stuff. I think he’s been a very productive coach. I don’t know anything about Coach LaFleur,” added the former QB.
Brett, sir, you may not know him or be totally tapped in. But you giving your opinion is kind of the whole point of your podcast, right? Maybe keep that political correctness for that hypothetical campaign trail!
Favre saying that he doesn’t know what’s going on and that he’s watching from a distance doesn’t exactly imbue the subsequent opinion with a lot of weight either. Well, he went on to speak about the performance in the playoff game.
Favre described how this was not the first time the Packers had blown a lead this season. And it seemed like he was having an inner battle trying to decide whether to throw LaFleur under the bus for that.
In the end, he simply said there’s “something” that’s leading to all of those choke jobs. “He’s definitely a good coach, but that’s not the first time that’s happened to ’em,” Favre said.
“I actually went to the Dallas game earlier in the year that they ended up tying, and if I were a betting man, I would have bet the farm that Green Bay would have walked away with it. Didn’t even need overtime… And there are other examples… There’s something that’s enabling them to have that same [result],” he concluded.
The Packers were one of the preseason favorites to win the Super Bowl this year, especially after that Micah Parsons trade. But they couldn’t even win their own division, ending behind Chicago with a 9-7-1 record. And the Bears embarrassed them with comebacks from down 21-3 at half (January 10) and 16-6 with two minutes left (on December 20) within the space of a month.
There was also the early-season game where the Packers were up 10-0 on the Cleveland Browns with four minutes left. They lost that matchup 13-10. The late-season one was equally telling: Where they were up 23-14 on the Denver Broncos, only to lose that game 34-26.
There was surely a bad pattern late in games this year for the Packers. And Green Bay will be hoping their newly re-signed head coach was not the reason for it.
