Jacobs Is Back. The Defense That Has to Protect His Leads Isn't.

The good news is real: Josh Jacobs is active and back in the backfield. A running back who ran for 984 yards and 13 touchdowns last season — numbers that made him Green Bay's most reliable offensive weapon through the first three quarters of the year — is no longer a question mark. That matters. In a stretch where this team has dropped four straight and is hemorrhaging points at the rate of more than a point per game worse than its season average, getting your best ball-carrier back isn't nothing.

But here's the number that should temper the celebration: the Packers are 4-6 over their last ten games, and the defense is the reason. Jacobs can grind clock, protect leads, and take pressure off Jordan Love — all of that is true. What he cannot do is cover a cornerback room where only Keisean Nixon has played meaningful snaps all season. He cannot replace Javon Hargrave, who is on injured reserve and leaves a defensive tackle group with no proven depth behind him. He cannot fix a linebacker situation where Zaire Franklin handles nine-tenths of the production and Kristian Welch is the entire contingency plan behind him.

I wrote two days ago about the three holes Green Bay was walking into Dallas with. Jacobs being active closes none of them. Micah Parsols is still out. The safety depth behind Xavier McKinney remains untested. The cornerback situation is, structurally, one injury away from genuinely alarming — and Brandon Cisse is listed as questionable right now.

The offensive half of this team is, frankly, in decent shape. Love is healthy. Jacobs is back. Romeo Doubs produced 848 yards and seven touchdowns as the top receiver last season, and the skill position group is largely intact. If the Packers can run the ball and control tempo, they can manufacture wins even in a cold stretch. That has always been the offensive identity here — grind it, protect the quarterback, make opponents earn every yard.

The problem is that controlling tempo requires a defense capable of getting stops when it matters. And right now, Green Bay's defense is a unit where one position group after another has a starter and essentially no one behind them. That's not a depth chart — that's a tightrope. Jacobs returning means the offense can do its job. Whether the defense can do its job is a separate question entirely, and nothing that happened this week changed the answer.