Green Bay Can Run the Ball. It Cannot Stop Anyone From Running It Back.

The three-game winning streak is real, and so is the caveat buried inside it. Green Bay's defense has held its last three opponents in check — the news coverage noted as much after the Cowboys game — but the unit doing that holding is operating on a skeleton crew that gets thinner every week. Javon Hargrave is on injured reserve. Micah Parsols, the cornerback the entire secondary was built around, remains out with his ACL tear and won't practice this week. Three more players landed on injured reserve before the Dallas game. The Packers are 4-2 and sitting in a playoff spot, and the defense has been good enough to win. The question worth asking is whether "good enough" has a ceiling, and whether that ceiling is lower than where this season needs to go.

Now layer in the offense. Josh Jacobs returning to practice this week — Matt LaFleur called him an elite-level back and said he has a chance to play Sunday — is legitimately significant news. Jacobs ran for 984 yards and 13 touchdowns last season. He is the engine of what Green Bay wants to do, and MarShawn Lloyd, who has shown genuine promise in his absence with 152 rushing yards and four total touchdowns through eight games, was always a complement rather than a replacement. Getting Jacobs back makes the offense harder to defend. That part is straightforward.

Here is where the numbers push back against the optimism. Green Bay is averaging barely a third of a point per game better than their opponents across six games. That margin is thin enough that defensive breakdowns don't get absorbed — they become losses. And the defensive depth chart right now has one cornerback with meaningful playing time this season in Keisean Nixon, no proven backup at the safety spot behind Xavier McKinney, and a linebacker room where Zaire Franklin accounts for 90 percent of the production. Franklin has 45 tackles and a sack; the next linebacker on the depth chart has a fraction of that. This is not a unit built to weather a bad day.

The defense has been shutting people down, which is the counterargument, and it's a fair one. But three consecutive wins against opponents who may not have tested every vulnerability is not the same as structural soundness. I've been tracking this secondary since Parsols went on the PUP list in the summer, and the consistent finding has been that the players behind the starters haven't logged enough snaps to know what they are. Brandon Cisse has been a bright spot — 28 tackles, a sack, an interception — but he's a corner, not a safety, and the safety depth behind McKinney remains unproven at game speed.

My read is this: the Packers are a better team with Jacobs than without him, full stop. But the version of this team that wins a playoff game in January is not the one that scores 24 and hopes the defense holds. It's the one that scores 24 and knows the defense can hold. Right now, Green Bay has the former and is auditioning for the latter. Eleven games left to find out if the audition passes.