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Just like that, we’re at the halfway point of the Green Bay Packers’ 2026 season. They are 5-3 and positioned to make a run at another playoff berth, if not more.
Not everything has been perfect. All three of their losses have come against NFC opponents, and two of which have come against divisional foes. They’ll get a chance to bounce back against Minnesota and Detroit at Lambeau Field later this season.
They have gotten contributions from a wide range of players, and some have seen their value to the team rise during the course of the year. Others have taken a step back. With half a season in the books, who are some guys that are rising and falling? We analyze that here.
Some eyebrows were raised this offseason when the Packers gave Christian Watson a lucrative contract extension to keep him in Green Bay for the foreseeable future. Watson has always carried value in Green Bay’s offense even if he did not have the gaudy box score numbers to show for it.
This year, he has found the box score numbers to match. He is on pace to not just top 1,000 yards for the first time in his career; he’s on pace to reach 1,500 yards. He has grown into a leader in the receiver room, as well, with that leadership on display Thursday night as he was willing to play through significant pain.
Watson’s toughness and ability to fight through a broken rib impressed all of his teammates, and showed why everyone in the organization raves about him whenever they get an opportunity.
Through eight games, Watson leads the team in yards and touchdowns. He has 16 fewer targets than Matthew Golden, but is just one catch behind him. Watson is ascending into a star, which is exactly what Green Bay’s passing game needs him to be.
It’s OK to admit it. You wanted Jim Leonhard, the former Wisconsin Badgers player and coach, to be the team’s defensive coordinator after flirting with the job in the past.
It’s OK to admit that you watched the clips from HBO’s Hard Knocks and were worried that Jonathan Gannon was a strange guy who could not possibly motivate a defense after failing as a head coach.
It’s also OK to admit at this point that if you thought that, you were wrong. Gannon’s defense has been excellent for most of the season. They gave up 39 points in the first game of the year at Minnesota and 35 against Atlanta two weeks later.
Those two performances are really skewing what has otherwise been a really strong showing from Gannon and his defense early in the season.
He has not had his best player for the entirety of the season with Micah Parsons still not practicing. His next-best player, Edgerrin Cooper, played 14 quarters before bowing out with a torn Achilles.
What has Gannon done? He has weaponized his defensive backs and moved them all over the formation.
Gannon’s defense is much more aggressive than any of the men who have preceded him during the Matt LaFleur era. He’s not a loud, boisterous personality like Rex Ryan. He’s not outspoken like some other great defensive coordinators have been.
What he is, is a darn good coach.
The Packers rank fourth in defensive DVOA. They are third in yards allowed per play, including fourth in passing yards allowed per play.
He’s also got collective buy-in from his players. One of the marks of a well-coached team is when the players in the locker room are all saying the same things as the coaches and their fellow players. Green Bay’s defense is constantly repeating the same lines that Gannon states to the media. They’re parroting terminology from each other, as well.
Gannon’s defense looks fast, disciplined and confident in everything it’s doing.
Soon, it will get Parsons back, too.
“I can’t say enough great things about our defense, Jonathan Gannon,” LaFleur said after Thursday’s game. “The job he’s done, just being aggressive the entire game and putting a lot of pressure on the quarterback.”
The potential bad news here is that if Gannon keeps this up, he may get another opportunity to be a head coach somewhere else.
Yes, Golden has had some issues with drops. In fact, he leads the league in drops. You know how you get to the point where you lead the league in drops? You’re always open. Golden is almost always open, and leads the team in receptions with 43 in his second season. He’s second to Watson in touchdowns with four.
Watson and Golden look poised to be the first pair of Packer teammates to break 1,000 yards receiving in the same year since Jordy Nelson and Randall Cobb did that in 2014.
Yes, Golden needs to clean up the drops. He knows that, but he certainly looks the part. If he keeps getting open, the ball will come his way. If the ball keeps coming his way, there’s a good chance he’s going to keep making plays as he has all season.
The Packers are relying on Jordan Love more than they ever have during his time as the starting quarterback.
When Love took over for Aaron Rodgers in 2023, the idea was to keep a team around him that made it so he did not have to play the role of Superman every week. Through eight weeks this season, it’s hard to tell where the Packers might be if Love was not playing as well as he did.
Thursday’s game against Carolina might be a perfect microcosm of the Packers as a team. Love started out the game on fire, completing 17 of his first 20 passes with two touchdowns to get the Packers out to an early lead.
He threw a third touchdown pass in the third quarter to make the score 27-10 and it looked like the Packers were going to coast to victory.
From there, the lack of running game bit the Packers as Love cooled off. He threw a bad interception on a pass he said he wished he had back right after the game ended.
As Love cooled off, the Panthers crept closer. Ultimately, Green Bay was able to escape with a 27-19 victory, but it never should have gotten that close.
Love is operating with an offensive line that has gotten him killed almost every week. His run game is nonexistent. His receivers lead the league in drops. His team leads the league in penalties.
All the while, Love has continued to play as well as he ever has. He’s thrown 16 touchdown passes to just six interceptions. He might work his way into MVP conversations if the Packers can continue to win with him playing well.
Perhaps the two biggest beneficiaries of Jonathan Gannon’s defense coming to Green Bay have been the defensive backfield duo of Evan Williams and Javon Bullard.
Bullard is the team’s nickel defender. He has a tenacity that has been missing from this Packers defense for years. He hunts opposing ball-carriers, and has been asked to hunt opposing quarterbacks more than ever.
“Yes. Not even close,” Bullard said when asked if he was blitzing more this year than last year. “The trust that the coaches have in me, I’m so grateful for that. We come to practice, we work every day, we put things on tape that coaches notice. Some coaches have the guts to dial them. up, some coaches don’t. You respect the ones that do.”
Bullard does not have a bunch of gaudy stats in the box score, but his fingerprints are all over the game whenever Green Bay’s defense is on the field.
Evan Williams has been one of the beneficiaries of Bullard’s willingness to do the dirty work. He does have the box score numbers to match the impact he has made, as well.
Along with the team lead in tackles, Williams has two interceptions, one sack, six PBUs, two tackles for losses and one fumble recovery. Gannon’s willingness to deploy his best defensive players all over the formation makes them unpredictable and more disruptive than they were in recent years.
As a result, the Packers have surpassed their number of takeaways from 2025. Bullard and Williams are big reasons for that.
Far and away the worst part of Green Bay’s team is its run game. Words like historic and generational are often thrown around too loosely, but if you can think of a bad superlative, it fits this Packers team.
The Packers are on pace to break records in a bad way for how putrid they’ve been on the ground through eight weeks.
It’s not as if they’ve faced a schedule with a bunch of legendary defenses such as the 1985 Bears, 2000 Ravens, the 1970s Steel Curtain or the Vikings’ Purple People Eaters.
Two of Green Bay’s last three opponents entered a game against the Packers with the last-ranked run defense in the NFL. One game had Josh Jacobs active, one game didn’t. Neither one mattered.
They are averaging 60.6 rushing yards per game and 2.85 yards per carry, both the worst in the league. The Packers in eight games have a league-worst 485 rushing yards, which is less than any team has in six or seven games.
Asked after the team rushed for 66 yards on 26 carries (2.54 average) against Carolina if there was anything that gave him optimism, LaFleur said: “If I’m being honest, not a lot right now, and that’s our job as coaches. We got to figure it out, because it’s not good enough.”
Will the Packers make the same mistake again? In Jordan Love’s first season as the starting quarterback, Anders Carlson looked like he was going to be money in the bank through the first month and a half of the season.
Everything changed quickly. Carlson missed six field goals and five extra points during the regular season, then missed a field goal in the playoffs against San Francisco that helped sink the Packers’ potential magical run to the NFC Championship Game.
Carlson was cut in training camp the following year, and the Packers have had a revolving door at kicker since then.
Trey Smack is the next one up in the Packers’ kicking version of the price is right. The Packers traded up to select him in the sixth round, and never gave him any real competition in training camp.
He’s shown plenty of talent. He’s 2-of-2 on field goals longer than 50 yards. The first kick of his career was a 58-yard bomb that opened the scoring for Green Bay in Minnesota.
In the last three weeks, however, he’s really struggled. He missed three kicks against Chicago, but that was waived off as a learning opportunity since the Packers won 31-7. Two weeks later at Detroit, he missed one chip shot field goal and had another blocked in a game the Packers lost by three.
Thursday against Carolina, Smack missed an extra point and was immediately met to a stadium full of boos.
With a chance to ice the game with a 53-yard field goal with less than a minute left on the clock, Matt LaFleur sent out his punting unit. If you needed any indication how he feels about his rookie kicker at the moment, that told the whole story.
The Packers have tried to preach patience with Smack, but how patient can a title contender afford to be? The Packers certainly fancy themselves as a team who can make a run at the Super Bowl. The margin for error in those big games is razor thin. Smack leads the league in missed kicks.
Brian Gutekunst should not be afraid to make a move if his struggles continue.
When Tucker Kraft was activated from the PUP list in training camp, the general consensus was that he would be ready to take the season by the horns and pick up where he left off a year ago.
That was the expectation set by Kraft, who looked like he was ready to be the best tight end in football when he was lost for the season with a torn ACL.
His rehab went extremely well, he was mostly ahead of schedule during his comeback and able to practice quickly in camp to be back in time for Week 1.
Through eight games, however, Kraft is just now starting to look like himself. His best play of the season was arguably a tight end screen against Carolina that was wiped out by an ineligible-man-downfield penalty.
The most catches he has in a game this season is six, which he’s done twice. He has no more than 64 yards in a game, and has found the end zone three times.
Mind you, this is a Packers team that is throwing the ball more than they ever have with Jordan Love at quarterback because their run game is virtually nonexistent.
Maybe Kraft is starting to find some momentum with a six-catch night against Carolina, including a touchdown in which he lined up as a receiver.
If the Packers are not going to be able to run the ball, they need all three of their top guns in the passing game to be at their peak.
Kraft hasn’t gotten there yet.
The NFL truly is a war of attrition, and it’s a wonder where this Packers team could be if they were not as banged up as they have been for most of the year. Their starting slot receiver and right tackle made it through one series of the second game before suffering season-ending injuries.
The offensive line has been in flux all year. Their star linebacker, Edgerrin Cooper, tore his Achilles during the third game of the season. Their prized free-agent addition at defensive tackle, Javon Hargrave, tore his Achilles during the fourth game.
Oh, by the way, two of their best players are working their way back from torn ACLs. Tucker Kraft is playing, but just now is beginning to look like himself again. Micah Parsons is set to start practice soon, but has not played one snap of football as the Packers sit at 5-3.
Injuries suck. They take the best players out of games for every team. The Packers are not alone in this – in fact, they entered this week’s games atop this injury list – but it is worth wondering where this team could be if they were able to get some good fortune from the NFL’s health gods.
Matt LaFleur had the perfect six-letter word for his defensive coordinator, Jonathan Gannon, following the Packers' win over Carolina. ⬇️https://t.co/aCM9sVLN52
— Bill Huber (@BillHuberNFL) October 30, 2026
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