After sluggish start, Packers have been starting fast at ... starting fast, a key vs. 49ers

Kyle Shanahan is 0-34749 when trailing in the fourth quarter.

OK, I made that number up, but the real stat isn’t significantly more friendly. In order to be leading late, the Green Bay Packers would have to get out ahead early. This San Francisco 49ers looks fundamentally different when forced to play from behind than when they can play with a lead where they can keep teams off balance with run and pass and kill them with play-action.

For half the 2023 season, Jordan Love, Matt LaFleur, and the Green Bay Packers offense couldn’t do anything to force opposing teams to change their game scripts. Well, consider the script flipped in the time since. That is exactly what the Packers will need in order to pull the stunner in Santa Clara.

The turnaround is as remarkable as the opening of the season was unremarkable. For the first eight weeks, the Packers’ first-quarter offense placed 26th in expected points added per play (EPA/play) and 30th in success rate. They scored just seven points in the first half of Week 1 and famously failed to score at all until a furious Love-led comeback in the fourth quarter of Week 3.

Injuries to Aaron Jones and Christian Watson sapped Green Bay of a consistent run game as well as any kind of vertical passing elements to the offense. That condensed the playbook and forced LaFleur to call extremely conservative games early on until his team inevitably fell behind and had to start throwing it. But the Packers were never able to translate those second-half adjustments into first-half productivity the following game.

The structure of the offense didn’t need to change; the execution did. Specifically, the Packers only mildly increased their play-action usage in the second half of the season, upping it to 27.3% from 23.4% of dropbacks. However, they executed those plays on an entirely different level. Love’s Pro Football Focus passing grade on play-action jumped from 50.2 to a gobsmacking 92.3 in the second half of the year.

Jones’ return sparked the run game and provided balance to the offense, but the play-action massacring of defenses began long before the star running back fully reintegrated into the offense. Green Bay went away from concepts like Drift-Strike that are more single-read and into staple plays like Dagger where Love can read out the defense and make confident throws. Even while the offense struggled, Love consistently saw coverages well and got to open guys. Five of his 11 picks came in a two-game stretch and eight of the 11 came during that four-game losing skid.

But even when Love was throwing interceptions, plenty of them came either in desperation time (the fourth quarter of games against the Denver Broncos, Pittsburgh Steelers, and Las Vegas Raiders) or were good decisions paired with missed throws (the end of the Raiders game).

That’s the biggest difference: It’s Love. His mastery of the offense, his calm demeanor in the pocket, and his ability to make LaFleur right even when the play was wrong took the Packers to the moon. We saw it on full display on Sunday afternoon against the Dallas Cowboys.