Not only do experts make statistical predictions on teams, they also make predictions on who is going to be a playing a certain amount of time. Every sports group has their predictions, analysis, and opinions. The one I will be going over is NFL’s staff Gregg Rosenthal from Around the NFL. He goes over every division and every team projecting who he thinks is going to be the 22 starters for each one. In this article, he went over the NFC North, which every fan knows includes the Packers
Here are his projected starters for both offense and defense of the Green Bay Packers:
Projected Starters on Offense
Most of the starters for the offense are already known and pretty much the same from the previous year, other than quarterback of course. The main surprise for me here is who he has as a starter at the TE position. He listed Tucker Kraft instead of Luke Musgrave. This means he believes that Kraft is going to be a part of more snaps than Musgrave. That was a definite surprise for me.
I was also interested to see which type of offense he was going to list since he can only have 11 players listed. It could have been three WRs, two TEs, or two RBs. I personally believed he was going to list the offense with two TEs. He instead decided to include both RBs, Jones and Dillon, to the list and only one tight end. This means he sees both our backs having more play time than the second tight end, which again surprisingly for me is Musgrave.
Other than those two aspects of this list, everything else is pretty much what you would expect. Love is at quarterback. Watson and Doubs are the two WRs. The O-Line is pretty much the same with the difference being that Jenkins is back so now Runyan is on the right side instead of the left like last year. This list makes perfect sense to me. I do think both Jones and Dillon are going to be utilized. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Dillon took over the starting job and was our RB1 by the end of the year.
Projected Starters on Defense
The defense is almost exactly as you would expect it to be. The only two spots that were a bit of a surprise for me is the corner position and the safety position. For the corners, I expected Eric Stokes to be one of the starting three instead of Nixon. I don’t want to spoil Rosenthal’s amazing analysis on his projections, but he does give a good reason why he didn’t list Stokes here. After reading it, I would agree that it is possible, but I personally would still list Stokes over Nixon. If Nixon is our slot guy or CB3, I would be pretty worried about our passing defense.
The safety position is a big worry for me. I don’t think Savage is going to work out like we had hoped, yet I trust him for than I do Ford. If they are our starters at safety then I would expect a lot of big plays to happen against us. I hope Savage proves me wrong and shows he is as good as we expected when we drafted him. Rosenthal gives his thoughts on what he thinks the packers will do and I sure hope they listen to him. Overall though, our defense is strong and the projected starters are what anyone would expect.
One thing most fans will notice is that our first round draft pick, Lukas Van Ness, is not projected on the list. I would agree because i don’t see him beating out Preston Smith or Rashan Gary. I think he will rotate with Smith as he is getting on the older side of his age, but I don’t see him having more snaps than him. Unless an injury happens to one of them, I see him developing this year and being a starter next season.
Conclusion
After seeing Rosenthal’s projected starters and reading his analysis, I have strong hopes for our defense. However, I felt the same way after reading his same article last season though. It will really depend on how our first round draft picks from this year and last year do. According to an article by McQuade Arnold, both rookies seem to be on the upside in terms of understanding the game and behavior issues on the field. This gives me more hope our defense can perform as well as it looks on paper.
Either way, I really enjoyed reading Rosenthal’s article and his thoughts on how the team will use different players. I would recommend giving it a read if you would like to know about each player and the depth the Packers have at each position. Again, you can read his full article of the Packer and the rest of the NFC North, and the rest of the divisions as well, right here.
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