Jacobs Is Coming Back. The Question Is What He's Coming Back To.

The backfield news is genuinely good: Josh Jacobs is eligible to return Monday, and a running back who totaled 984 rushing yards and 13 touchdowns last season getting healthy again matters for a team that has dropped four straight. Emanuel Wilson has carried the load in his absence — 499 yards and 3 touchdowns in 18 games — but the production gap between a workhorse starter and a capable fill-in is real, and Green Bay has felt it during this losing streak.

Here is the problem the Jacobs return cannot fix. The defensive tackle position has effectively ceased to function as a depth chart. Javon Hargrave — who handled every documented snap at the position last season, accounting for all measured production at the spot — is out. Jonathan Ford is out. What remains is Devonte Wyatt, a three-year, $57 million extension, and a collection of players in Aiulua Fanene and Karl Brooks who have not logged a meaningful snap at the position all season. That is not a rotation. That is one man and a prayer.

I wrote two weeks ago that the defensive tackle situation had become a crisis the moment Hargrave went down. What has developed since is something worse: the crisis has calcified. The $57 million Wyatt extension, which I examined last week, was signed to make him a cornerstone alongside Hargrave, not to make him the entire room. Green Bay bought a co-anchor and lost the ship.

The structural problem here is one the offense cannot offset. Jacobs returning improves Jordan Love's play-action options and gives the offense a genuine ground threat again — last season's 13 rushing touchdowns from the backfield were a significant part of how Green Bay controlled games when it was winning. But a functional running game does not stop opposing offenses from identifying that the interior of Green Bay's defensive line is compromised and attacking it directly. If you can run the ball at will against this front, Jacobs's return to the other side of the ball is a wash.

My read is that Monday represents a genuine fork. If Wyatt is healthy enough to play extended snaps and the surrounding pieces hold, Green Bay can manufacture a functional game plan around him. If he's limited — and a 33-year-old Hargrave was already an aging starter before his injury removed him from the equation entirely — then what the Packers are fielding at defensive tackle is not a depth chart at all. It is a single point of failure dressed up in a depth chart's clothing. Jacobs coming back is the best news Green Bay has had in weeks. It just doesn't answer the question that actually determines whether this season survives.