GREEN BAY – Tapping into some of his former associates’ brains is something Green Bay Packers coach Matt LaFleur is doing more often.
Last year, he brought in former New York Jets coach Robert Saleh and former Packers quarterbacks coach Luke Getsy to assist him in assessing his units. Saleh, a former defensive coordinator, helped assess the offense and Getsy helped assess the defense.
With Saleh now the defensive coordinator in San Francisco and Getsy hired to LaFleur’s staff as a special offensive assistant, LaFleur has hired former offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett to help assess the defense.
LaFleur likes the idea of someone from the opposite side of the ball trying to find areas of weaknesses that an opposing coach might attack.
“I just think it’s a fresh perspective,” LaFleur said. “Especially when you take a defensive guy and put them on offense and vice versa, an offensive guy on defense, it gives you a little different lens to see it through and talk through it.
“So, he (Hackett) is sitting in with all our defensive staff and spending time in the linebacker room and kind of just going through the film. It gives them a good offensive perspective.”
LaFleur said Hackett will spend the entire year with the team, although he won’t be in town every week, similar to what Saleh and Getsy did last year.
On offense, LaFleur is using quality control assistant Rob Grosso to offer a defensive prospective. Grosso was a defensive quality control assistant for Arizona for four seasons and served as an assistant to Denver head coach Vance Joseph in 2018.
Grosso was hired in November 2023 to help LaFleur with the offense.
LaFleur said he was first introduced to a coach assessing the other side of the ball when he was quarterbacks coach in Atlanta in 2016.
LaFleur pleased with work on Day 1
LaFleur made it clear to the players before the opening practice that he wanted a clean operation and no displays of unnecessary aggressiveness.
He said the players followed through.
“I thought yesterday was pretty clean,” he said. “I thought our guys did a good job of competing, but also taking care of one another, because ultimately, we need everybody healthy for us to be at our best.
“So, I thought there were a couple situations where you’re always stressing staying away from the quarterback in those passing plays. There were a couple that were, you know, a little too close to the QB, but I thought by and large, our guys did a good job of competing, getting their work in but also taking care of one another.”
Running back Josh Jacobs could have been laid out at the end of a passing play in the end zone, but cornerback Nate Hobbs avoided him at the last second.
“I don’t know how Hobbs pulled off,” LaFleur said.
There’s a simple way to keep all the offensive targets happy, LaFleur says
The addition of rookie receivers Matthew Golden and Savion Williams to go with some established passing targets like Tucker Kraft, Romeo Doubs, Jayden Reed and potential contributors like receivers Dontayvion Wicks and Malik Heath and tight end Luke Musgrave will create a lot of competition for the ball.
Quarterback Jordan Love will have a lot of say in who gets the ball the most, but so will the coaches and the defense.
LaFleur said there’s an easy solution to players potentially feeling left out.
“Winning,” he said. “Hopefully, winning will keep them all happy. I mean, the beauty of our offense is you really don’t know necessarily who’s going to get the ball. I think it really frees up the quarterback. He doesn’t have to feel that pressure: ‘I’ve got to get this guy the ball.’
“It’s really on us as a staff to try to move these guys around and showcase what they can do.”
This article originally appeared on Packers News: Packers coach Matt LaFleur finds value in hiring his former associates to evaluate team
Reporting by Tom Silverstein, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Packers News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
