The Green Bay Packers will look to keep up their hot start to the 2025 regular season this Sunday when they square off against the Cleveland Browns.
While the next game is always the most important one, perhaps more so in football than any other sport, one key Packers starter is already overlooking the Browns and discussing the possibility that Green Bay runs the table and finishes with an undefeated record.
This surely isn't what head coach Matt LaFleur wants to hear from starting left tackle Rasheed Walker. There is simply no upside to discussing this publicly after just two weeks of play. All it does is put an even larger target on the backs of the Packers, no matter who that week's opponent is.
Rasheed Walker Just Jinxed Green Bay with Undefeated Talk in Week 3
Walker should enter every game that Green Bay plays thinking that he and his teammates are going to win. If the 25-year-old were not bringing that approach to the field, the Packers would have a much larger issue on their hands. However, quiet confidence is the appropriate approach at this stage of the season, and Walker missed the mark there in his comments to the media on Wednesday.
"And if the goal is to keep it going, then I think we can go undefeated, honestly," Walker stated, via Dave Schroder of WBAY-TV. "I mean, personally, I also tell people that we could have gone undefeated the past two seasons. We lost a lot of the games off a couple plays, but I feel like our offense has been playing so good and so disciplined, and our defense is playing even better. Pound for pound, I look at these teams and I don't really see who is better than us."
You can't put Pandora back in the box. This quote is out there now and will almost certainly be rehashed to that week's opponent from now through Week 18. Now, the onus is on Walker and his Packers teammates to back that talk up with their performance on the field.
Given that Green Bay owns the league's sixth-best offense and the third-best defense through the opening two weeks, there is every reason for Walker to feel as confident as he is. When you take a deeper look at the Packers' statistics as a team, you see they have a top-10 red zone offense and defense. They also have the sixth-best defense on third downs, getting off the field over 67% of the time. These numbers further reinforce just how impressive this team is and why Walker felt confident enough to utter the "undefeated" word so early in the season.
With as unpredictable as the NFL season can be, LaFleur probably would have preferred his starting LT to keep the undefeated talk to himself for now and keep the focus on this Sunday's showdown with the Browns.