Green Bay's survival plan for the first five weeks is already leaking
Tucker Kraft appeared in only eight games last season. That single fact shaped Green Bay's entire offseason calculus — the tight end room got rebuilt, the receiving corps got restocked, and the front office made a $57 million commitment to Devonte Wyatt to shore up the pass rush. The plan was coherent. The problem is that coherent plans assume the secondary holds together long enough for the offense to carry the load, and right now that assumption is being stress-tested before a regular-season snap has been played.
Micah Parsols is the load-bearing wall here. An All-Pro cornerback on the PUP list with an ACL tear, targeting a Week 6 return against Dallas — that is five weeks of NFL football without your best cover man. The front office knew this going in. What they did not plan for is Javon Bullard managing a foot injury simultaneously, and Brandon Cisse adding a knee scare out of the Denver preseason game on August 22. Cisse called it nothing serious, and maybe he's right. But "nothing serious" is exactly what every secondary depth player says until it becomes something serious, and the Packers have now burned through enough of those reassurances that the pattern itself is the story.
The number that should be making Green Bay's defensive coaches uncomfortable is this: the depth chart at cornerback currently lists Shemar Bartholomew and Domani Jackson as the top two options. Those are the names behind Parsols. That is not a knock on either player individually — it is simply an honest accounting of what the unit looks like when you remove an All-Pro and ask the next man up to cover NFL receivers for a month. The front office identified Kamal Hadden as a slot contributor after strong preseason work, which is a genuine silver lining. One silver lining does not a secondary make.
What makes this genuinely dangerous rather than merely inconvenient is the context from last season. Green Bay's defense fell apart in December — a minus-6 point differential per game in that month alone, and the final five games of the season produced a losing streak that ended the year. That collapse happened with a healthier roster. The front office responded aggressively: McDuffie extended, Wyatt locked up through 2029, the tight end room rebuilt around a returning Kraft. Those moves address the right problems. But none of them put a proven cornerback on the field for Weeks 1 through 5, and that is the gap that preseason injuries are now widening.
My read is that the Packers are banking on Jordan Love and the offense to outscore secondary breakdowns early, which is not an unreasonable bet given that Love threw for 3,704 yards and 27 touchdowns last season behind a supporting cast that was frequently undermanned. Romeo Doubs led the receiving corps with 848 yards and seven touchdowns. The offense has real weapons. But asking an offense to paper over a porous secondary for five consecutive weeks, against opponents who will absolutely identify and attack that vulnerability on film, is a significant ask — and the preseason injury ledger is making it a bigger one by the week.