Green Bay Packers: 5 Most Intriguing Players for 2021 Season
By Paul Bretl
The draft is complete, and while free agents can still be signed, free agency has been at a crawl for weeks now. OTAs are on the horizon, and not long after that, training camp—yes! We’ve already started, but more and more, we will begin looking ahead to the Green Bay Packers’ 2021 season.
Who needs to step up? Any surprise cut candidates? Can Green Bay make another Super Bowl push? Among many other items. I’m sure at some point I’ll get to all of that, but today we will be looking at five of the most intriguing players on this year’s team.
The fun part with this is that we all define this term differently, and if I asked 10 different Packer fans for their answers, I’d probably get 10 different answers. For reference, the dictionary defines intriguing as “arousing one’s curiosity or interest.” Like I said, what peaks one’s curiosity may not for someone else—and that’s the fun in this.
Feel free to share your answers below, or find me on Twitter at @Paul_Bretl—I’d love to hear your thoughts. Now, let’s dive on in!
Preston Smith
In Preston Smith’s first season with the Green Bay Packers in 2019, we saw him have a career year. His 12 sacks were the eighth-most in the NFL that year, and his 62 pressures were tied for the 15th most. Now, sure, expecting him to put together a similar performance in 2020 may have been a bit unrealistic–odds were that some regression was going to take place. However, I don’t think many of us foresaw his production falling off a cliff either.
His 12 sacks from 2019 turned into just four this past season, while his 62 pressures fell to only 29. In fact, by PFF’s pass-rush productivity metric, which measures how efficiently the pass-rusher gets after the quarterback, Smith ranked 100th out of 122 eligible edge rushers. Even in the run game, Smith would struggle, oftentimes losing contain out on the edge.
So what can we expect from Smith in 2021? Well, that’s a big reason why he’s on this list. But my guess is somewhere in the middle.