Green Bay Packers: Depth at Edge Rusher Now in Question

This is a veteran Green Bay Packers team that has finished 26-6 during the last two regular seasons and advanced to two straight NFC Championship Games–this team has a lot of strengths, to state the obvious. And one of those strengths coming into the 2021 season was the edge rusher position.

This is a position group that ran three deep with some high-quality players. Za’Darius Smith has recorded 32 sacks and 164 total pressures over the previous two seasons, according to PFF ($$), and was named a second-team All-Pro in 2020.

Rashan Gary is an ascending player who appears poised to make that Year 3 leap. And even Preston Smith, who is coming off a down 2020 season, had 15 sacks and 62 pressures in 2019–c certainly not a bad year for the team’s third-best edge rusher.

But oh, how quickly things can change in the NFL when an injury occurs.

On Friday, we learned that that the Green Bay Packers would place Z. Smith on IR, which means he is going to miss at least three games, and possibly more. All of a sudden, a position group that was an obvious strength has some questions surrounding its depth.

Now, don’t get me wrong, P. Smith and Gary can and should still form a very good duo. There’s no replacing Za’Darius on this defense, but if Preston and Gary play to their abilities, they’ll wreak some havoc. With that said, if Gary doesn’t take a step forward — I think he will — or P. Smith doesn’t bounce back, the margin for error within this position group has gotten much smaller without Z. Smith.

On top of that, as good as P. Smith and Gary have the potential to be, neither player is able to play the entire game–they’ll need to take some snaps off. And that means the Green Bay Packers will now have to rely even more heavily on Jonathan Garvin and/or Chauncey Rivers–a clear dropoff from whoever you would consider the third edge rusher when Za’Darius was healthy.

Garvin certainly has upside, but he is a former seventh-round pick with only 112 career defensive snaps. Last week against New Orleans, he didn’t record a pressure or a tackle in 27 snaps. Rivers is an undrafted rookie from the same 2020 class as Garvin and has even less experience with only 26 career snaps. Rivers would also not record a single stat against the Saints in his 11 snaps.

The Green Bay Packers also recently signed LaDarius Hamilton off of the Tampa Bay practice squad. Hamilton has no career NFL snaps.

Ultimately, every team has to deal with injuries to varying degrees and likely rely on players with little NFL experience. It’s not realistic to expect the Packers to have four or five game-changing edge rushers on this roster.

With that said, this also shows how quickly things can change in the NFL, and with how important pressuring the quarterback is, there is no such thing as too much depth at the edge rusher position. Green Bay went from having one of the better edge rusher rooms in the game to there now being some real questions around this unit’s depth until Za’Darius can return.