The Green Bay Packers offense line management continues to completely befuddle me beyond belief. After Aaron Banks had to leave the game on Sunday due to a toe injury, which, as of the writing of this article, we still do not know the severity of, the Packers went back to Donovan Jennings at left guard again. Jennings’ insertion promptly led to the Packers’ run game getting stuck in park. Jennings then had to leave the game due to injury, so Green Bay gave rookie Jager Burton, who had received most of the first-team snaps at left guard all pre-season, the remainder of the snaps in that position. And he was fine. Not great, but he was fine. He looked like an NFL player.
I’m not going to highlight every snap he played, but there are a few good and bad ones worth pointing out. The first one here is a good one, as he and center Sean Rhyan pass off a T/T stunt cleanly.
On the flip side, here is the entire offensive line contributing to a play dying.
Burton’s anchor here is pretty poor, and he loses so much depth that he then gets steamrolled by the end. Despite the left side kind of goofing the whole thing, the primary issue on the play is Belton just losing his one-on-one rep, but no one covered themselves in any glory on this play.
Inside zone or duo? Probably duo based on the attack angles of the double/combos. Burton and Morgan don’t get the type of displacement they’d ideally like on this one, but the run still goes for four. Burton’s man does make the first initial tackle, but the run didn’t have a destiny much longer than that with multiple Jets showing up at the same time. This play kind of encompasses most of Burton’s reps in the run game: Just sort of fine. Tyler Brooke and I had a disagreement on the value of Burton but we saw the same thing, and you can see both sides of it in this play. Burton completes the assignment and doesn’t lose the rep, per se, but also just doesn’t have much physical juice after the point of contact to give you any splash.
This isn’t stonewalling, but this is a pretty clean pass between Burton and Rhyan when the Jets run a mike/will stunt. These can be particularly hard games for interior offensive linemen because they’re usually at a pretty distinct athleticism disadvantage, but this little game doesn’t beat them. Despite Morgan washing out the edge around the loop and Burton being able to toss the linebacker out of the pocket, this is where you can see Jordan Love still be affected by the disaster from last weekend. He bails out of a pocket that was clean if he just steps up to his right, and basically kills the play with what is effectively a dirted ball. One big hop step up and to his right and Matthew Golden probably walks in with a touchdown as he roasted his man on a crosser.
Unfortunately, we have to close on what is probably Burton’s worst rep of the day.
To be fair to Burton, this is a tough spot for him to hang. T’Vondre Sweat is listed at 366 pounds and has alignment leverage on Burton before the ball is snapped. Because Morgan has to work up to the second level off the snap, and Rhyan is a full gap-and-a-half away from Sweat, Burton just has to take the big man one-on-one. While Burton gets nice initial contact, Sweat has him set up from the get-go. He keeps his helmet on the outside, baiting Kaleb Johnson to cut off Burton’s behind, and then chucks Burton out of the play entirely to make the tackle. This is just kind of what happens when a slightly undersized guard is matched up with an athletic nose tackle without a leverage advantage. Sometimes you just get beat. Even here, though, on a bad play, Green Bay still picked up three yards, so it doesn’t throw things completely off-schedule.
I think the story of Burton’s snaps in this game are exactly what you’d hope for for a day three rookie. He was fine. The pass protection looks ahead of the run blocking, but Green Bay’s running game wasn’t necessarily setup for his game. While they ran a lot of outside zone early, by the time Burton got into the game, it was more duo and inside zone. There was one outside zone rep that went for a nice gain, but Burton’s man tried to jump the gap and basically washed himself entirely out of the play.
I don’t see any reason, regardless of injury status for Donovan Jennings, and assuming Banks will be out for Thursday, why Burton shouldn’t be the starting left guard this week. And depending on how he looks in future snaps, could earn himself a full-time starting role at one of the guard spots for the long haul.
