Green Bay Packers Aren’t Generating Pressure at Same Rate in 2020

Compared to their dominant performance in 2019, this season, the Green Bay Packers’ defense isn’t generating pressure at the same rate.

The Green Bay Packers’ defensive unit from 2019 was far from perfect, however, they were much improved from the season before. And a big reason behind that improvement was their ability to get after the quarterback.

The additions of Za’Darius Smith and Preston Smith proved to be monumental as the duo combined for 25.5 sacks and 167 total pressures. Then, of course, we can’t forget about Kenny Clark and his six sacks and 69 pressures. As a team, Pro Football Focus credited the Green Bay Packers with a pressure rate – how often the team sacked, hit, or hurried the quarterback – of 38.6 percent, which was the fourth-highest rate in 2019.

This season, however, has been a different story. Through the first four games of the season, we haven’t seen that Packers’ pass rush dominate as they did a season ago. Their team pressure rate has fallen to 17.6 percent and ranks 25th in the NFL. While by ESPN’s pass rush win rate metric, which measures how often a player can beat their blocker in 2.5 seconds or less, the Packers win rate has dropped from 47 percent in 2019 to just 33 percent this year.

A silver lining is that Green Bay’s 12 sacks are the eighth-highest total in the NFL this season, but as OLB Coach Mike Smith passionately puts it, sacks are nice, but consistent pressure is more important to a defense’s success (via Packers Wire):

"“I care about pressure, affecting the quarterback, that’s the No. 1 thing. I’ll take a guy that does his job play after play after play after play, being consistent and have zero sacks, but does his job and affects the quarterback,” Smith said. “If you got a room that believes the only way to get a pressure is to get a sack, you’re going to have a very disappointing room in the NFL. These (blockers) are good. I could care less about the sack stuff.”"

So what’s the difference between the 2019 season and this year? Well, to be honest, this isn’t much of a difference, but Mike Pettine could help create more pressure by blitzing more often. In four games, the Green Bay Packers have blitzed on just 19 percent of their defensive snaps, which ranks 27th in the NFL.

However, blitzing has never been apart of Pettine’s MO. Even with all the success Green Bay had last season in terms of pressuring the quarterback, they still only blitzed 22.7 percent of the time, the fifth-lowest rate that season.

The simplest answer is that the players aren’t winning their matchups as consistently as they did in 2019. For starters, Kenny Clark hasn’t played since Week 1, so clearly, that isn’t going to help the Packers’ pass rush. But we’ve also seen Preston Smith struggle as well. After recording 12 sacks and 62 pressures in 2019, through four games, he is on pace for only four sacks and 20 pressures this year.

Even Za’Darius Smith, who had a monster game against Atlanta, started off the season a little slow. So, once again, that doesn’t help the team’s cumulative pressure stats either.

Although there is a lot of star power in this Green Bay Packers’ secondary, for this defensive unit – and this team – to be at their best, they need to get after the quarterback at a higher rate. The return of Clark and Rashan Gary will certainly help, Pettine could absolutely use more blitzes and stunts, and of course, winning those one-on-one matchups more often will be a game-changer.

But regardless of how they do it, this is an area that hopefully continues to improve as the season goes on.