As the NFL enters week nine, we are officially halfway through the 2025 NFL season. The Packers are 5-1-1, leading both the NFC North and the NFC itself. If the playoffs started today, they’d have a week off to heal up and collect themselves: a crucial advantage considering how early Green Bay’s bye week fell on the schedule. 

But the playoffs don’t start today, and there’s a whole lot of football between now and then. 

Now, for as well as the Packers have played, there are still some cracks showing through the veneer. The Packers’ offense has been a rocky, up and down unit so far through seven games, lurching from the offensive explosion in Dallas to the stonewalled effort in Cleveland. When you have an offense that is capable of either extreme, there’s an important factor for consideration, and it’s the topic of today’s article: offensive sustainability. 

In defining sustainability, there are a couple of different benchmarks we can work through, but I lean towards placing heavy emphasis on a couple of key metrics. These are: red zone efficiency, third down conversion rate, turnover differential, and success rate. They each come together to paint a picture of how efficiently an offense runs: turning opportunities into points, keeping the offense on the field in crucial moments, avoiding costly errors, and staying in advantageous down / distances. 

But sustainability can come in so many forms in the NFL, and it stems from what you want to be, as an offense. Are you a run heavy, grind it out offense that looks to stay ahead of the chains? Do you live in the quick game / RPO world, looking to manipulate the defense into advantages you can exploit? Or are you an air raid, pass heavy offense that looks to create lots of deep, explosive plays? 

Of course, no team can truly live in the most extreme ends of the spectrum without sacrificing that sustainability. Giving the defense one thing to key on is begging to have that one thing shut down when it matters most: the playoffs. 

A healthy run/pass ratio is a reflection of that idea. The Packers currently sit at a 51% pass rate, about the same as it was when I wrote about the running game in general a few weeks ago. That number has the Packers sitting as the #7 most run heavy team in the league, just a few percentage points behind the Buffalo Bills, who sit at #1 in the league in run rate. 

As one of the most balanced teams in the league, there is a ton of weight to fall onto the shoulders of Josh Jacobs and the offensive line. So how sustainable has the running game looked?

I’ve said it before, but I personally consider yards before / after contact to be the ultimate measuring stick for a running game. Those two splits can give you such a good picture of a team’s rushing attack, which can be so multi-faceted. 

So far though 2025, the Packers are averaging about 1.19 yards before contact, 22nd in the league (which averages around 1.4 YBC). This stat is a great indicator of how a team sets up the running game. Offensive line performance and running back vision are the main contributors. In yards after contact, the Packers as a team are averaging 2.74, which would also land them at 22nd in the league (2.89 yards is the average). This is more indicative of a running back’s ability to fight through that contact, and create extra yards for themselves. 

So through those metrics, the Packers are falling towards the bottom third of the league in areas that you really don’t want to be at the bottom of, as far as creating a sustainable running game. Really, yards before contact is measuring how hard are you are making life for your running backs. 

This isn’t to say that the Packers have a bad rushing attack. Remember those other key metrics we talked about at the top? Let’s look at how the rushing attack measures up. 

From a top-down, numbers only perspective, the Packers do have an efficient rushing attack. You’d like to get that yards per attempt number up, but that's another reflection of the yards before/after conversation. 

Now in the passing game, it’s been a different story for the Packers. Green Bay has been exceptional when passing the ball, and Jordan Love’s performance on Sunday Fight Football put the league on notice to that fact. Let’s take a look at the same chart, but focusing on the passing offense. 

The passing game is always a bit hard to throw into the discussion surrounding a sustainable offense. There are so many more moving parts to discuss here, and it’s difficult to find just one metric to pick out to show that trait. To me, success rate is the closest that we can get to (remember, success rate measures whether or not a play is keeping a team ahead of the chains in getting first downs: 6 yards on first down, half the length remaining on second, and the total remaining yardage on third / fourth down). 

Now that we’ve got a clearer picture of the component parts of the offense, how does it look when it’s all put together? Here’s the same chart, but with a couple extra metrics thrown in. 

The Packers have an above average offense, no matter which way you slice it. 

Remember those metrics I identified as key measurements of sustainability at the beginning of the article? The Packers are above league average in every single one of them. Red Zone efficiency: check. Third down conversion rate: check. Turnover differential: check. Success rate: check. 

So as we look forward to the rest of the season, how can the Packers sustain their success? 

It comes in the form of adding new wrinkles to an offense, while maintaining stability on what you already do well. As we have discussed, the Packers are a run-heavy team. With a 52% run ratio, the running game is designed to act as the steady, humming engine of the offense, while the passing attack is the injection of nitrous to get them over the finish line. 

The offensive line obviously has a part to play in all this. Over the second half of the season, it’s probably the biggest question mark on the entire team. And it starts with the simple question of: can the Packers find (and stick to) a starting lineup? The team has gotten remarkably more healthy (knock on all the wood) over the last few weeks, but as long as there is an ongoing rotation at right guard, there is uncertainty. Jordan Morgan spent two weeks (Cincinnati and Arizona) as the starter, with Sean Rhyan riding the bench, only for Rhyan to come back and take a far majority of snaps in the Pittsburgh game. 

In the past when the team has had rotations at spots on the offensive line (think the left tackle spot in 2023), the team settled into a starter late in the season and allowed that player to get comfortable at the position. If that strategy is going to come into play again in 2025, it must happen soon. 

As far as adding new wrinkles to the 2025 Packers, I think we got a major preview of that on Sunday. It came in the form of #9 Christian Watson returning to the lineup, and having an instant impact. 

If you are reading this article, I probably don’t need to spell out all the ways that Watson changes the game. But he’s just the perfect player for this offense. Watch Josh Jacobs’ rushing touchdown and Tucker Kraft’s first touchdown, and try to spot who’s clearing the way for them. That’s right, it’s big #9. Not to mention Love’s big throw to Watson to set up a touchdown (on what may have been Love’s best throw of the night). The Packers have a champagne problem at wide receiver, when figuring out how to fit all these pieces together, but inserting Watson has paid instant dividends. 

Now, the other part of the formula, maintaining stability on what’s already working. That’s Jordan Love. For anyone out there who is still holding onto their priors, who still doesn’t think Jordan Love has it, or can’t come up with big plays when it matters most, I invite you to open your eyes and join the real world. 

After a 2024 season that was (as it’s becoming more and more obvious) marred by injuries and issues outside of his control, Love has seized the 2025 season by the reins. The Packers will go as far as Jordan will take them this season. 

Part of that means suiting the offense around his skill set. In the Steelers game, I thought Matt LaFleur did an excellent job of creating a gameplan that would maximize the quick passing game, something that the Packers had the lowest league rate in, prior to Sunday’s game. Against Pittsburgh, Jordan attempted 22/39 passes in the “quick game” (released within 2.5 seconds), for a 59% rate, up twelve points from his season long average. And well, we saw the results. 

Was it so effective because the Steelers weren’t expecting the Packers to utilize it? It’s worth pointing out that Pittsburg has also been extremely susceptible to that style of offense in past games too. While other teams might not share the Steelers’ unique weakness to it, it’s an area that the Packers must continue to exploit. 

Green Bay has a date with the Carolina Panthers next on the schedule, and while no game in the NFL is a gimmie, the Packers have an excellent opportunity to build on the success they created for themselves in Pittsburg. While you are watching, remember the keys we talked about today: exploit the quick game, find stability on the offensive line, and increase yards before contact in the running game.