Green Bay's Offseason Answers a Depth Problem It Hasn't Fully Solved Yet
The number that should haunt Green Bay's front office isn't from the win column — it's the swing of three points per game. The Packers were a plus-1.82 team through their strong early stretch in 2025. Over their final ten games, they went 4-6 and flipped to minus-1.2. That's not a slump. That's a roster that ran out of players.
I wrote in July that the Devonte Wyatt extension was a bet on Green Bay's best self rather than its most recent one, and I stand by that framing. Locking Wyatt into a three-year, $57 million deal through 2029 makes sense as a foundation piece — you build defenses around interior anchors, and the front office was right to secure him before the market moved. The one-year extension for Isaiah McDuffie alongside it reinforces the linebacker room. These are real additions to the defensive core. But here's the honest question those moves don't answer: the late-season collapse wasn't primarily about the players Green Bay had. It was about what happened when those players weren't available. Committing long-term money to your starters is not the same as fixing your depth.
The secondary situation makes that distinction urgent. Micah Parsons — a first-team All-Pro in his debut Green Bay season, even while missing three games to the ACL tear — is sitting on the PUP list at the start of camp with a Week 6 target for his return. That means the Packers open the season with their best defensive back unavailable, and the group behind him has not yet demonstrated it can carry the load. Five weeks is a long time to survive on depth that was already exposed last December.
On offense, the injury report compounds things. Tucker Kraft is currently out, and Chris Brooks was placed on the non-football injury list before camp even opened. Kraft's absence matters because, in only eight games last season, he posted six touchdown receptions — a production rate that made him one of Love's most efficient targets. The response was signing Thomas Yassmin, a former Australian rugby player brought in as an international exemption. I have no objection to creative roster-building, and the international pipeline has produced legitimate NFL contributors. But signing a developmental rugby convert to patch a tight end room that just lost its two most productive players is not a depth solution — it's a placeholder.
What the Packers have done this offseason is protect the ceiling. Jordan Love threw for 3,704 yards and 27 touchdowns against just six interceptions in 2025, Josh Jacobs ran for 984 yards and 13 scores, and Romeo Doubs gave them a reliable top target. That core is intact, and the Wyatt and McDuffie extensions are real commitments to keeping the defensive infrastructure around it. The activation of Aaron Banks and Nazir Stackhouse from the PUP list on Day 1 of camp is a genuine positive sign — at least some of the depth pieces are ahead of schedule. But the late-season collapse was a floor problem, not a ceiling problem. The box score from December wasn't telling Green Bay its stars weren't good enough. It was telling them the roster behind those stars was too thin to sustain a full season's worth of attrition.
The 2026 Packers will be a good football team when everyone is healthy. The question the offseason hasn't fully answered is whether they've done enough to remain a good football team when everyone isn't. Last December answered that question one way. The front office has responded with extensions for proven contributors and a kicker swap and an Australian rugby player. Some of those moves are smart. None of them are depth.