The Green Bay Packers lost their second-best offensive player, Jordy Nelson, to a torn ACL last week. Now, they may be protecting their best offensive player from getting injured in a meaningless preseason game.
All signs point to quarterback Aaron Rodgers sitting out the remainder of the preseason, which is a very smart move by head coach Mike McCarthy.
The reality is, veteran starters need very little, if any, preseason reps to be ready for Week 1. For a team’s top players, it’s hard to imagine there being enough value in reps in exhibition games to make it worth any risk, but coaches have historically played their starters for three quarters in the third preseason game.
Nelson’s injury as well as a slew of others across the league has teams rethinking their strategy, even if the volume of injuries is fairly normal. Perhaps teams are more willing to embrace data analysis that likely suggests there is no correlation between preseason reps and regular season wins. At least that’s what we would expect the data would say, but coaches are often slave to tradition.
That doesn’t appear to be the case for McCarthy, who is far from the most progressive coach in the league.
“Every decision that’s made any time our players take the field — whether it’s practice, games — is done with risk assessment,” McCarthy said Wednesday, via Rob Demovsky of ESPN.com. “Every decision that has been made to this point, I’m very comfortable with the assessment of the risk.”
The risk assessment was likely almost overwhelming against playing Rodgers because three starting offensive linemen are injured and unlikely to play. Left tackle David Bakhtiari has a knee injury, guard T.J. Lang a concussion and guard Josh Sitton an ankle injury. Putting Rodgers behind a backup offensive line against the Eagles starters almost seems negligent, so the Packers smartly are going the other direction.
Playing your backups against starters also has added potential for the purposes of player evaluation. One of the greatest challenges for talent evaluators is adjusting for level of competition, so this strategy gives the Packers a look at how backups may play when called upon.
“The backups don’t normally get these type of reps,” said backup quarterback Matt Blanchard, via Demovsky. “We have a lot of respect for Philly and their defense. Their starters are going to be playing a lot of time.”
Blanchard and fellow backup quarterback Brett Hundley will get a chance to play against players that are much better than what they have faced, but so will the rest of the backups, including some of the defense. The starting defense will probably play, but probably not more than a few series.