Green Bay Packers: 3 Biggest Surprise Players from 2020 Season

Green Bay Packers Surprise No. 3: OT Billy Turner

I’ll start by coming clean on this one: I was so wrong about Billy Turner. So wrong, in fact, that I wrote an article over the season explaining why I was so wrong. You can click here if you’d like to dive into that.

During the offseason, I wrote a few articles highlighting my concern about Turner at the tackle position, and with Lane Taylor in the mix and guard and Rick Wagner at right tackle, I wasn’t even positive that Turner would be a starter. Hindsight, that was an awful take.

But Turner proved me wrong, and might I add, that I’m happily wrong. Turner not only played right tackle for 427 snaps but also right guard for 246 and left tackle for 367. Including both playoff games, he gave up just four sacks — with two of them coming in the NFC Championship — and only 30 pressures on 617 pass-blocking snaps.

For some context, in 2019, Turner had 764 pass-blocking snaps, according to Pro Football Focus ($), and allowed nine sacks with 52 pressures.

And by ESPN’s pass-block win rate metric, which measures how often an offensive lineman can hold his block for at least 2.5 seconds, Turner ranked third among all eligible tackles. Not bad at all.

Before the season, I thought that Billy Turner was a prime cut candidate this offseason as a way to create additional cap space. However, with his high-level of play and versatility, there is no way that the Green Bay Packers can justify moving on from him now.