Three Positions. Three Holes. One Game Against Dallas.

Green Bay's defense is walking into the Cowboys game with Micah Parsols still sidelined, Javon Hargrave on injured reserve, and a safety room that has been scrambling for functional depth since Javon Bullard's foot injury surfaced in camp. That is not a depth problem. That is a structural failure arriving all at once, against a team with the offensive firepower to exploit every layer of it.

Start with the cornerback situation, because it is the most acute. The depth chart behind Keisean Nixon shows two names — Kahlef Hailassie and Domani Jackson — neither of whom has logged a meaningful snap in this system. That is not a rotation. That is a theoretical fallback. The roster analysis flags this as a position with no viable depth behind Nixon, and with Parsols still weeks away from his Week 6 target, Green Bay is asking Nixon to anchor a corner room that has one proven player and hope. Against a Dallas passing offense, that equation gets tested immediately.

The defensive tackle situation compounds it. I wrote last week about how Hargrave's injury turned Devonte Wyatt's three-year, $57 million extension from a complementary commitment into the entire plan. That remains true. Wyatt is active, which is something, but behind him the depth chart lists Aiulua Fanene and Karl Brooks — two players who, like the corners behind Nixon, have not demonstrated they can hold a starting snap when the game is real. Green Bay has one defensive tackle who has earned his snaps this season. One.

The safety picture is quieter in the headlines but no less concerning. Xavier McKinney is the anchor, and behind him the depth chart shows Benjamin St-Juste and Carrington Valentine with no meaningful production logged. Bullard's foot injury forced the front office to work out additional safeties during camp, which tells you everything about how thin the room was even before the season started. McKinney cannot cover for a depleted corner group and a compromised pass rush simultaneously — that is asking one player to solve three problems.

What makes this particularly damaging is the convergence. Any one of these holes — no proven backup corner, a thin defensive tackle rotation, a safety room without reliable depth — is manageable in isolation. Teams navigate individual position vulnerabilities every week. But three at once, against a team that can attack all three, is a different kind of stress test. The late-season collapse last year — four straight losses, a point differential that turned sharply negative — happened when this defense ran out of answers. The Cowboys game is arriving before Green Bay has found any new ones. My read is that this defense does not have the margin to absorb mistakes the way a healthy, deep unit can. Every blown assignment, every coverage bust, lands harder when there is no one behind the starter who has proven they can clean it up.