There's one negative difference for LaFleur compared to the other "Playcallers"
The Athletic's Jourdan Rodrigue produced and reported for an amazing podcast series during the offseason: "The Playcallers", which you have probably already heard about. It tells the story of how the tree of Kyle Shanahan, Sean McVay, Matt LaFleur, and Mike McDaniel developed into one of the best offensive groups, schematically speaking, in the entire NFL. […]
The Athletic's Jourdan Rodrigue produced and reported for an amazing podcast series during the offseason: "The Playcallers", which you have probably already heard about. It tells the story of how the tree of Kyle Shanahan, Sean McVay, Matt LaFleur, and Mike McDaniel developed into one of the best offensive groups, schematically speaking, in the entire NFL.
All of them worked together for the famous 2013 Washington Redskins staff, and all four are head coaches now. As we're talking about the Green Bay Packers, LaFleur deserves a lot of credit. Even though he hasn't won the Super Bowl, he has three 13-win seasons, has reached two NFC Championship Games, and opened the way for quarterback Aaron Rodgers to win two more MVP awards.
But there's one area in which LaFleur is far behind his counterparts: hiring assistant coaches.
Since Matt LaFleur became the Packers head coach in 2018, the coaching staff has been under scrutiny, and rightfully so. It's hard to know exactly the impact of offensive assistants behind a playcalling head coach, but former offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett and former quarterbacks coach Luke Getsy haven't had much success since leaving Green Bay. On defense, it's a revolving door. Initially, LaFleur agreed to keep Mike Pettine, but he was fired two years — and a couple of run defense disasters — later.
In 2021, the Packers had three primary candidates for the job. Jim Leonhard was chosen, but declined the offer to stay with the Wisconsin Badgers. The other two options: Joe Barry and Ejiro Evero. It quickly became clear that LaFleur made a mistake in choosing Barry, as Evero turned the Denver Broncos into one of the best defenses in football in 2022 — and see how bad they are under Vance Joseph now.
This past offseason, he could have changed the direction of the defense again. Solid coaches like Brian Flores and Jim Schwartz were available — and I'm not even talking about Vic Fangio, because he went to the Miami Dolphins as the highest-paid defensive coordinator in football. But the decision was to keep Barry once again.
On special teams, the Rich Bisaccia hire was universally praised, and a relatively obvious move after special teams killed the 2021 season. But Bisaccia is LaFleur's third special teams coordinator, after two bad misses: Shawn Mennenga and Maurice Drayton.
Meanwhile, the other "Playcallers" have been pretty successful hiring coaches. Kyle Shanahan has been a head coach since 2017, and his coaching tree is already impressive: Robert Saleh, Mike McDaniel, and DeMeco Ryans all have shown enough capacity to be hired elsewhere and, with varying levels of success, are doing decent to good jobs. He lost Saleh and Ryans as defensive coordinators, and this year hired Steve Wilks. Even getting poached multiple times, Shanahan was able to make smart decisions to find replacements.
For the Rams, this is even more pronounced. Over the years, Sean McVay lost Matt LaFleur, Zac Taylor, Kevin O'Connell, and Brandon Staley. For the offense, he found answers — the last one is Matt LaFleur's brother Mike. On defense, he passed over his linebackers coach *checks notes* Joe Barry to hire former Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Raheem Morris, who's done a solid job even with questionable personnel.
The decisions for Mike McDaniel are still recent, and therefore harder to analyze, but the process of getting Fangio to be the defensive coordinator was as clean as possible.
Matt LaFleur is a great offensive mind and a really good leader. However, his ability to build a prolific coaching staff hasn't kept up the Packers demand.
Matt LaFleur gets real after Packers get run over by Lions
The Packers head coach was clearly frustrated after his team got blown out by the Lions.
