Lynn Dickey Says Green Bay's Penalties Are Coaching. The Beat Writer Answered His Own Question Both Ways.
A former Packers quarterback called Matt LaFleur's approach passive. Bill Huber opened by concluding yes, this team is undisciplined, and closed by saying no — then Green Bay lost 35-14 and fell to 1-2.
Green Bay has committed more penalties than any team in football and given away more yards doing it than anyone else. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whose problem it is, and the two people arguing about it are unusually well placed to disagree: a quarterback who played a decade for this franchise, and the writer who watches the current one every day. The argument has also just lost its most convenient escape route: on Thursday night Green Bay lost 35-14 at home to Atlanta and fell to 1-2.
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Lynn Dickey, who started for the Packers through the late seventies and eighties, put it on the head coach, and he did it by contrasting the current team with his own. His argument was not about talent. It was about what a staff tolerates. Green Bay's total is not a close-run thing either. It leads the league in both the count and the yardage conceded, which removes the usual escape route of arguing that a handful of marginal calls have distorted an otherwise ordinary record. When a team is first in both columns, the argument stops being about officiating and becomes about the team. That 26-for-231 figure covers the first two games only, and is now itself a week out of date.
Penalties are coaching and if you don't get after people and demand that they do the correct things, that's coaching.— Lynn Dickey, former Green Bay Packers quarterback, on The Bill Michaels Show (via Forbes/Yahoo Sports)
He was blunter still about the man responsible. "I don't know the personality of Matt LaFleur, but it sure appears to be very passive," Dickey said, before reaching for his own era as the comparison: "We didn't have the greatest talent when I played, but almost every year we were in the top-three of fewest penalties." The specific category that bothers him is the one hardest to defend - "I see the stupid penalties post-play, unsportsmanlike stuff" - because those are the flags that have nothing to do with a scheme and everything to do with what a room accepts.
Two verdicts on the same flags
26 accepted penalties for 231 yards through the first two games — the most in the NFL in both. Green Bay has since lost 35-14 to Atlanta and sits 1-2.
"Penalties are coaching… if you don't get after people and demand that they do the correct things, that's coaching."
"I don't know the personality of Matt LaFleur, but it sure appears to be very passive."
"We didn't have the greatest talent when I played, but almost every year we were in the top-three of fewest penalties."
"There's no other conclusion to draw other than yes." He also wrote that "the Packers are not a good team."
"Is Matt LaFleur's team undisciplined? No, but it's quickly trending the wrong way." Same column, opposite answer.
Bill Huber, covering the team for Packer Central, answered the same question twice in one column and gave opposite answers. Under a section headed "Is Matt LaFleur Coaching an Undisciplined Team?" he wrote that "from the vantage point of two weeks, there's no other conclusion to draw other than yes," and added flatly that "the Packers are not a good team." He then closed the piece with the inverse formulation: "Is Matt LaFleur's team undisciplined? No, but it's quickly trending the wrong way." That reads less like carelessness than like a writer caught between what two weeks of evidence shows and what he is prepared to conclude from two weeks, and it is a more honest place to be than either sentence alone. The distinction underneath it is real enough. A team that is sloppy and winning has a nuisance; a team that is undisciplined has a character problem, and those need different fixes on different timelines. Dickey says it is the second. Huber's column says both, in that order - and the Atlanta result has since removed the winning half of the benign explanation.
A former quarterback is describing a culture. A beat writer is describing a trend. The gap between those two words is most of a coaching career.
Culture Or Trend
Post-play and unsportsmanlike flags have nothing to do with scheme. They are about what a staff tolerates, which is the definition of coaching.
Pre-snap errors are the signature of unfamiliar personnel rather than a broken culture — though the defense that these flags were not costing games expired at Lambeau on Thursday.
Whether the count falls. Not whether they win - whether the same team commits noticeably fewer flags once the newness wears off.
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Sources: Yahoo Sports / Forbes — Dickey on the Packers' penalty problem, Sports Illustrated / Packer Central — Matt LaFleur's Packers have a discipline problem, Packers.com — Packers fall to Falcons, 35-14