Why Your Team Sucks 2024: Green Bay Packers

Some people are fans of the Green Bay Packers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Green Bay Packers. This 2024 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: Show the pick.

Full disclosure: I am a Vikings fan. As such, the following preview is rife with bitterness, delusion, unfounded accusations, whining disguised as aggression, and a poorly veiled inferiority complex that has afflicted me for roughly four decades. So stop reading if you can’t stomach any of that reverse homerism. If you’re one of those “People who use profanity are relying on it as a crutch!” tight-asses, just know that I brought the whole fucking hospital supply room with me for this one. Get it? Got it? Good. Fuck off.

Now, if you’re still here, and you root for the Packers … Fuck you. I shit on your face.

Your 2023 record: 9-8. Allow me to wallow in the stink before I cover the supposedly heartwarming transformation this team underwent in the back half of the season.

The 2023 Packers started off, much to my libido’s satisfaction, with a 3-6 record. This was not an aberration. Green Bay played legitimately terrible football. They blew a 12-point fourth quarter lead to Desmond Ridder in Atlanta. Does Desmond Ridder even have an NFL job anymore? Does he have ANY job? Probably not. The Packers also gave up 121 yards on the ground to David Montgomery in a home loss to Detroit. They lost to Vegas when their QB threw a backbreaking interception in the final minutes, and then they lost to the Broncos the following week in the exact same fashion. They got rinsed at home by Minnesota, and then gave up 205 on the ground to the horrid Steelers to put themselves in a seemingly inescapable hole. A cheesehole, if you will.

Oh, but what’s this? Did I hear someone waking up the echoes at midseason? Because after that cold spell, these Packers roared to life in a second half of the season that critics are calling “disgusting,” “nauseating,” and “Am I supposed to be happy about any of this shit?” Yes, Green Bay still got beaten at the gun by Tommy Moltobello and the Giants, and then they got blown away by Tampa a week after that. But every other game was a candy carnival. Look at these crazy kids beat the Honolulu Blue off of the Lions on Thanksgiving! And did I just see them take apart the defending champion Chiefs not long after that? WHOA FUCK THEY TOOK DALLAS TO THE WOODSHED IN THEIR FIRST PLAYOFF GAME! Could it be that the underdog Packers—long-ignored due to their little-mentioned, humble Wisconsin origins—were growing up right before our very eyes? OMG, were they gonna make it all the way to the Super Bowl?!

Well, no. Despite all of that hopey-changey bullshit, these Packers still went into San Francisco for the divisional round, took a seven-point lead into the fourth quarter, and then fucking blew it. Wow, big fucking surprise that you guys can't beat the Niners when it matters. Green Bay’s pathetic run defense gave up two tuddies to CMC, their boy-band wideout corps managed 10 piddly-shit catches, and their cutesy-poo quarterback threw two decisive picks. Who loved to blindly chuck passes up for grabs so that opposing DBs could undercut a route and snatch the ball away with ease? No, it wasn’t Max Vicodin Brett Favre handing out all of those freebies. It was the new guy!

And what if that’s as close as you get this decade? What if that loss to the Niners was the end for you, and not the beginning? Boy, that’d be a real shame. It would also be a real shame if the U.S. government selected your town for all future nuclear weapons testing!

Your coach: Matt LaFleur, who is big mad that everyone wants him to pick his favorite wideout.

"I want to vomit every time I hear 'No. 1 receiver,' to be honest with you," LaFleur said Monday. "It drives me crazy. That's something that you guys talk about. I feel like we've got a bunch of 'em."

If I ever meet Matt LaFleur, I’ll make sure to wear a sandwich board with WHO’S YOUR WR1?! painted on both sides. Then I’ll shove a fork into his balls. Dawww geez guys we just have so many great players I’d be a real jerky if I had to rank them! They’re not your kids, asshole. In fact, they’re probably all older than you.

The Packers had a bottom-five rush defense a year ago, and their pass defense finished second to last in interceptions. Someone had to take the fall for all of that, so say goodbye to Scapegoated Defensive Coordinator No. 47 Joe Barry, and say hello to Jeff Hafley, who you surely remember as the main character in all of those Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. I hate those books. That kid is a loser. Anyway, Jeffy here quit his job as head coach of Boston College on the spot after LaFleur offered a chance to move to the set of The Thing and take the fall when Green Bay’s linebackers blow every coverage assignment. Talk about wanting to vomit!

Your quarterback: Class suck-up Jordan Love. And lo, the good lord impregnated a tub of WisPride and said unto the drooling masses, “Behold, for this young passer is my word and my kingdom, and shall guide you to the divisional round, but maybe not any further than that?”

I have spent my whole footballing life listening to color guys verbally jerk off whoever’s playing under center for the Packers. They had a crush on DON MAJKOWSKI, for fuck’s sake. Does Brian Gutekunst cut you gentlemen a check directly? Is that how this dynamic works? Maybe Daunte Culpepper could have been something if you treated him with such blatant favoritism. Anyway, Jordan Love ended 2023 with over 4,000 yards passing and 32 TDs. Yes, the Packers did it again. Isn’t that so great. I’m smiling right now. You can’t see me smiling because I’m not on camera, but I’m totally smiling. Just so happy. Ecstatic. Yay.

Love’s second half of last season was enough to leave the entire chattering class of pro football convinced that the Packers’ dry-brining process for young QBs had yet again paid off with a Hall of Fame–caliber player. But you never know when The Meniscus Fairy will pay Nü J-Lo a visit now, do you? Oh, and there’s also the distinct possibility that Love’s breakout campaign does NOT mean he’ll justify the $55 million AAV that Green Bay just awarded him this offseason. From Arif Hasan at Wide Left:

Typically, better second-half-of-season quarterback results aren’t repeatable heading into the next season, regardless of our perception of a player’s development. If we look at quarterbacks whose PFF grade was 70 or under in the first half of the season, 70 or over in the second half of the season, and improved their PFF grade by at least 15 points over the two spans, we can get an idea. Since 2011, there have been 20 quarterbacks who met the criteria. The amount of times that the second half of their season better predicted their PFF grade the following season was just four times. Interestingly, the first half of their season was even better at nine times. The other seven belong to the full-year PFF grade.

In other words, momentum for individual players is unlikely to carry over to the following season, just as it is for whole teams. Jordan Love wasn’t a rookie last year. The three years he spent on the bench “learning” at the feet of legendarily selfless person Aaron Rodgers didn’t magically freeze Love’s age in place. His full 2023 season—which PFF ranked as 12th overall, three spots behind Kirk Cousins—is a more likely indicator for how he’ll play in the future than any truncated sample size. He is good, but prone to large-scale fuckups. I think that pick against the Niners kinda proved that.

Then again, you are the Packers, and you have both Satan and the refs on your side. So if the NFL wants this kid to be the Third Coming, they’ll make it happen. You will get exactly one Super Bowl victory out of this arrangement and no more.

Behind Love is Sean Clifford. Just pointing that out because, again, The Meniscus Fairy is always hovering just outside your bedroom window.

What’s new that sucks: The O-line! Green Bay lost both G Jon Runyan (to the Giants) and LT David Bakhtiari (to a retirement of hideous shitposting) this offseason. Now they’re hoping that former seventh-rounder Rasheed Walker and rookie RT Jordan Morgan will help keep Love clean. I hope they fail. Miserably.

Meanwhile, Green Bay cut RB Aaron Jones, freeing them from the burden of having to actually play him. Here to replace Jones in the backfield is former Raiders stud Josh Jacobs, who had his absolute worst season as a pro just last year. Jacobs will likely split time with A.J. Dillon, who can’t play for shit but has very large quads that perennially distract everyone from that fact. Your new kicker is TBD. Most importantly, the Pack signed S Xavier McKinney away from the Giants to fix the gaping hole in their secondary. McKinney was never shy about speaking up when the Giants locker room was a train wreck. I hope life in Green Bay gives him more to talk about.

The linebackers are still dogshit.

What has always sucked: I have never been to Lambeau, but I’ve been assured by people I trust that it’s as advertised: beautiful, pleasant, welcoming. Opposing fans can tailgate in Green Bay without fear. The Cheeseheads next to them in the parking lot might even offer them a beer and brat, as a sign of goodwill. That’s everything football should be, right?

WRONG. You go to a Niners game and you will be stabbed. Go to an Eagles game and half your section will be remanded to stadium jail before the half. Go to a Rams game and Stan Kroenke will personally hold you up by your ankles to shake the money out of you, and then shove a $25 cheeseburger hero up your ass. These are the teams that win NFC championships. These are winners.

You are not. You’ve had three quarterbacks in 32 years and the second-best record in the sport over that time, but only two Super Bowls to show for it. Know why? Because you’re fucking SOFT. You don’t stand during games. You don’t treat opponents with proper disdain. And you blow home playoff games with impunity because Lambeau doesn’t have a fucking roof. You people aren’t precious adherents to a lost way of doing things. That’s Republican shit. You’re just too dumb to understand what success in the modern world looks like. This is football, not a sock hop. Your run of luck at QB—and yes, it is luck—is the only thing that’s kept you more relevant than Notre Dame.

But the Irish’s cultural obscurity awaits you soon enough, and your team will become nothing more than a nostalgia act for unimaginative boomers. When that day comes, I’ll be too busy watching my team to give a fuck what happens to you people out there in the dead cold.

Wisconsin is the perfect state for people who find Indiana a little too cultured. Packers colors look like butt on every cool player. Minneapolis is due north of Green Bay. Kiss my white ass.

What might not suck: Oh please. What, you want me to say nice things about Romeo Doubs here? Take a fucking walk.

HEAR IT FROM PACKERS FANS!

Dylan:

Hunter S. Thompson opened his suicide note, "Football season is over," and that perfectly sums up Green Bay in February.

Colin:

I knew it would take all of 30 seconds of CNN’s breathless RNC coverage before I saw the entire WI set of delegates decked out in fucking Cheeseheads. 

Allen:

I’m just glad that Jordan Love has graduated from padawan to master in the art of throwing a backbreaking interception that seals the game for the other team. Just like his master, and his master before him.

Justin:

I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life than us giving up a TD the Niners’ final drive.

Lucas:

What was the point of any of this shit if we're still just going to get smoked in the playoffs by the 49ers!?

JB:

I'm not a superstitious person but it does seem karmatically significant that in return for the Packers getting immense longevity and talent at the QB position for my entire conscious lifetime, those same QBs inevitably reveal themselves to be massive pieces of shit with enough brainworms to kill a lesser Kennedy. 

Brian:

Fuck the shareholders with the Bronze Fonz.

Zoe:

This team has reliably had some of the shittiest special teams in the league for almost two decades. Besides segregation, Wisconsin has nothing to offer that its neighboring states don't do better. They can't even get booze right. New Glarus tastes like what people thought craft beer should taste like in 2008. Fried cheese curds are just shitty mozzarella sticks dunked in ranch. Fuck this fanbase, fuck this state, fuck the NFL.

Johnnie:

Last year I wrote in to talk about how charmless the area surrounding Lambeau Field is. The same week my little note got published, I attended a wedding where the reception was at a distillery a few blocks from the stadium. Boy did I understate how miserable that swath of development is. Just the absolute worst strip mall approximation of a venue.

Ben:

Matt LaFleur spends more time precision trimming his beard instead of finding proper strength and conditioning coaches to keep player’s hamstring injuries at a normal level.

Love your work Drew! Enjoy the five wins the Vikings have this year!!

Peter:

We are the Montreal Canadiens of the NFL, calling ourselves Titletown when half our rings came when league included teams from Muncie and Racine.

Can’t wait for Jordan Love to win a Super Bowl followed by eight NFC Championship losses.

Jon:

We will squander Jordan Love's good years by cheaping out on the roster, then roll on to do the same to the next guy in 2035.

Nick:

Our gap toothed ginger fuck president is quietly stepping down for Ed Policy. Policy’s father was Carmen Policy, who won Super Bowls leading the 49ers and then became part owner of the new Browns. Knowing our luck, we will get the Browns half from his son.

Dr. Brown:

Every color guy on TV wouldn't shut up every time Jordan Love completed a pass while dancing on his toes like a ballerina. They would show similar shots of Favre and Rodgers, and go on and on about how Love has so much in common with the Packers legends. They presume Packers fans will feel safe about the future when they go to sleep every night. Well, fuck them. Let me tell you what these QBs have in common: their ability to innovatively lose playoff games from a winnable position. 

Dave:

AJ Hawk was just as good a linebacker as he is a TV co-host.

Andrew:

90% of these dullards were one syllable away from calling Jordan Love a slur two years ago, and now they’re slobbering all over his dick like he’s the second coming of Jesus tap dancing Christ.

Jeff:

Most of last season was me telling people how "Love's stats are actually not too far off from Rodgers's his first year!" with the same tone that Homer uses to convince Bart that the barbecue pig was still edible. 

Michael:

Every one of our tight ends looks like he works at Top Golf for the employee discount. Our best cornerback has strong 'will start a podcast one day' vibes. Whenever there's a player with off the field issues, half of this fanbase is clamoring to sign them because, “There's nothing to get in trouble with in Green Bay,” ignoring the fact that the only thing you can do in the entire state is drink and shoot things.

If you asked me who I hated more in 2017, Brett Hundley or Donald Trump, I would have paused before answering.

I miss Marcedes Lewis more than Aaron Rodgers.

Aidan:

Jordan Love, I am eagerly awaiting to see how you disappoint me off the field.

Chris:

They can have the youngest, fastest, most fun to watch offense in the NFL, but two things will never change about why everyone hates the Packers: (1) the defense is always ass; and (2) the only visuals people will ever have when they think of the Packers are Brett Favre embezzling welfare money, Aaron Rodgers seething in a dark yurt, and those goddamned cheeseheads at the RNC.

Shalom:

Many Packer fans will tell you that they believed in Jordan Love all along. But back in early November, most of us were frantically refreshing Tankathon and trying to concoct scenarios where we could draft Caleb Williams.

The defense made people unironically wonder if Tommy DeVito was the next Tom Brady, and also whether Bryce Young might be an actual NFL quarterback. Joe Barry may be gone, but I already know his stink is going to linger for years, as stink generally does in Wisconsin.

Chuck:

Looking forward to another decade-plus of having the quarterback position settled, so that we can continually be called a "dark horse" Super Bowl pick and then suffer more of the sort of humiliating playoff losses that get played on our divisional rivals' highlight reels.

Matt LaFleur is just Mike McCarthy with a sharper jawline.

Larry:

I look at the Patriots or the Chiefs and wonder what could have been if someone other than Mike Sherman and Mike McCarthy coached us for 19 straight years.

Andrew:

I got all excited when the schedule was released and my beloved Packers were playing in my adopted hometown of Philadelphia. Couldn't wait to get heckled by all the hoagie-mouthed rubes of south philly. Then they moved it to Brazil. Thanks Roger Goodell. I hope Aemond Targaryen's dragon shows up at your house. Oh, and fuck Joe Barry.

Samuel:

At the beginning of the year, my girlfriend broke up with me. We were temporarily long distance with her living in Colorado and me trying to get the fuck out of Abbott’s right wing sandbox of Texas. We did long distance for five months, and I was trying like hell to land a job in a very unforgiving job market. After getting an offer, I called to tell her the great news. She said I shouldn’t take it because she’s breaking up with me.

A few weeks later, I bring a buddy along on a road trip that just so happened to coincide with the divisional round game against the 49ers. Of course we made a couple stops at dispensaries, because when in Rome. I just remember lying in the hotel the night of the game, high as shit feeling nothing as the Packers lost. Since that night I’ve followed the offseason news, free agent additions, draft, etc. but everything was met with a “meh” and a shoulder shrug. I will still tune in on Sundays, but a win or a loss just doesn’t affect me anymore.

P.S. Fuck the Bears, the Bears still suck.

P.P.S. Fuck the Vikings and their fans too, Drew that means you.

Mike:

I expect Jordan Love to lead us to a Super Bowl this year. Then next year, we will win the NFC North and lose the first playoff game to a mediocre NFC team (my money is on the San Francisco 49ers). In 2036, Love will be traded to the New York Jets and it will come to light that he's been donating to Donald Trump and DJT's future presidential campaigns while molesting female staffers at Lambeau and kicking puppies. He will promptly announce a third party VP candidacy with fucking MGT, and I will pray whatever QB the Packers drafted in 2034 suddenly starts having the career of his life so I can stay a fan of this team.

Andrew:

I’m one of like three black Packer fans in the world. So when all the Brett Favre stuff came out I kind of shrugged my shoulders. He’s a white man from Mississippi, for God’s sake. He’s literally trained to screw over black folk!

My favorite moment last season was watching Aaron Rodgers go down. I took many shots to celebrate.

Skylar:

I've been a Packers fan my whole life, despite not living in the state of Wisconsin. I attended my first game at Lambeau Field in 2015 with a few friends; the Packers lost that game to the Lions, the first time the Lions had won at Lambeau in something like 25 years.

We decided to hang around the stadium and drink our sorrows away at one of the many bars in the area. After quite a few beers, I got on Tinder to see what was available out there. I matched with someone who was in the same boat as me: in town one night only for the Packers game, and not looking for anything serious. And she was also at a bar close by, so this seemed like it would work out well.

I went over to another bar to meet this girl, and I saw her instantly when I walked in, dressed head to toe in Packers gear. We started talking and hit it off well, and then we went to the dance floor. After a few songs of standard dance/club music, this girl looks me in the eyes and says, "Why are they playing nothing but 'n-word' music here?" Only she didn't say "n-word", she said the actual word. No hesitation or shame. While I was trying to decide if I heard her correctly or not, she said, "I'm going to go tell the DJ to stop playing 'n-word' songs", and started walking towards him.

I turned around the other direction and left that bar and met up with my friends again. Turns out lots of beer is all I needed that night anyway.

John:

You hear that sound? That murmuring, lactose-saturated susurrus of rationalization and cope? That's every single green-and-gold painted lummox north of Beloit and east of Dubuque convincing ourselves that it's Our Year. It's already bad enough, considering the Jordan Love-In that we got last year from the football press. But it's going to get so much worse before the regular season starts. Real live human beings, with eyes to see and ears to hear, are going to tell you that Jayden Reed is as good as—no, better!—than Davante Adams ever was. Lukas Van Ness has already been accepted as the new John Kuhn Memorial Professor For White Male Fox Valley Resident Wish Fulfillment Studies. Someone will try to get you to be excited about James Turner. James Turner! Christ on sale.

Don't buy it for a second. This team is less than the sum of its parts, and kicking the rotting offal out of the Bears' carcass isn't gonna change that. A Wild Card exit just in time to inaugurate the Second Trump Imperium, which my state will help to usher in, beckons with the inevitability of the grave. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel STILL publishes stories weekly about Aaron Rodgers, which is down-bad behavior.

Andrew:

My mom, whose dementia is much worse now thanks for asking, somehow has hung onto the info that they lost tragically in the playoffs. She now gets sad and mad about it every three days. I hate this team and I hate this fanbase and I hate dementia.

Steven:

Spotted Cow isn’t in the top 10 craft beers brewed in Wisconsin, Culver’s is mid af, and fuck the forced birth enthusiast Zeitlow Family with a collapsed Leo Frigo bridge support. See you next time in hell, fuckos.

Ted:

I was just watching the show Independent Lens on PBS. This episode was called Beyond Utopia, and it was all about the difficulties involved with defecting from North Korea. It was fascinating, as you might imagine. There was obviously some history explaining how the two Koreas were separated, and they provided all this footage that had been smuggled out showing the brutal realities of life on the inside. All the various means of indoctrination were also shown. One of the subjects explained there was no word “American,” it was always “Americanbastard” written and spoken as one word.

At one point, they showed a North Korean film which was used to “educate” the people on what life in the U.S. supposedly is like. The film showed grim scenes which may or may not have actually been the U.S., and the narration said, “This is Wisconsin. It is the most godforsaken place in the world.” It has me wondering if Kim Jong Un deserved to be granted a little credibility, or if it was a broken clock being right twice a day sort of thing.

Will:

You know why Green Bay hit on a third QB in a row? It's because - since they don't have a single owner - they're modeled after a big corporation, with a board that puts proper succession plans into place and plans for transition at all levels of the organization. So, despite us coming across as a salt of the earth, small town, leave it to beaver type of team, our success ironically derives from acting like every big, soulless, asshole corporation in America. We are SUCH pieces of shit. No jury would convict you for shooting me dead in cold blood, but please do it after Jordan Love wins his one and only Super Bowl.

James:

Fuck Kevin King & Brandon Bostick forever. Still not over either game.

John:

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!! THEY’VE DONE IT AGAIN MAGARY! THAT’S RIGHT, GET READY FOR ANOTHER 15 YEARS!!!!

Submissions for the NFL previews are now closed. Next up: Tampa Bay Bucs.