What does the Packers pass game hierarchy look like after an offseason of consolidation?
It's not quite addition by subtraction, but streamlining the Packers passing game could be the best thing in Green Bay. But, what does that actually look like?
Good morning!
The Green Bay Packers enter the 2026 season without Romeo Doubs and Dontayvion Wicks, elevating the roles for Matthew Golden, and, potentially, Savion Williams as well. But injuries make projecting this group particularly difficult, especially if Matt LaFleur finally decides to lean more into the passing game.
In today’s newsletter, we dig into the numbers and try to predict how the target share will work in a streamlined passing game where the playcaller wants everyone to eat.
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It’s dangerous to take one season’s numbers and use them to extrapolate the next. Schemes, roles, and players change. They evolve and grow. But what has been constant for the Packers over the last three seasons with LaFleur and Jordan Love has been the democratization of the passing game.
The days of Davante Adams getting 140 targets are gone, due in no small part to the fact that Adams is gone. Green Bay doesn’t have a player capable of handling that type of volume.
And even if one arose, it’s worth wondering if LaFleur would even want to call his offense that way. The playoff game against the San Francisco 49ers, the bed-wetting of epic proportions, stemmed from Aaron Rodgers’ unwillingness to throw anyone but Adams the ball. That was partially a Rodgers problem, but it reflects a defect we see in the NBA all the time in the playoffs as well: heliocentric offense doesn’t work as well in the playoffs.
Better defenses, more bespoke game plans, and the nature of volatility make building the passing game around one player a risky proposition.
Green Bay loses 131 targets to Wicks and Doubs this offseason, so those have to go somewhere. Without Doubs and Wicks, we can safely expect Christian Watson, Matthew Golden, and Jayden Reed to see increased usage, but to what degree?
That’s the tricky part.
It’s not enough to suggest Golden vacuums up all of the Doubs targets, Savion Williams takes on the Wicks passes, and Watson extends his 2025 second-half with a monster 2026 campaign.
Injuries are the biggest reason why. Tucker Kraft missed half the season, as did Reed. Before the injury, Kraft got 18% of targets in the Packers offense when he played, which was 11th among tight ends. Kraft led all tight ends in yards per catch and yards after catch per reception last season. He was on his way to a true TE1 season, the kind of year that announces him as a star. Had the season ended on Halloween, Kraft would have made an All-Pro team.
Watson checked in at 19.9% with his target share, but most of that time was spent without either Reed or Kraft on the field. He was also wildly productive, finishing top 10 in yards per route run.
Doesn’t he deserve a bigger piece of the pie, too?
But then the Packers extended Jayden Reed, called him a “winning player,” and there’s plenty of room in 11 personnel for Watson, Reed, Golden, and Kraft to be on the field together. In fact, we would expect that to be the most-used grouping the Packers play in 2026, assuming reasonable health.
We also can’t safely assume Bo Melton will suddenly see the field materially less, or that Williams will see it significantly more. LaFleur likes to rotate his receivers, despite the protestations of fans and fantasy football players.
Last year, Packers quarterbacks attempted 489 passes, though Malik Willis and Clayton Tune each had starts, and Willis played most of another game. Eleven quarterbacks played 17 games last year, and only two failed to get to 500 attempts.
Let’s use 500 attempts as a baseline.
In 2024, Reed had a 16.2% target share, slightly down from 17.6% in 2023, and considering he’s only on the field when the Packers use three-receiver personnel, that seems like a fair number. Let’s split the difference there and get him 17% of the targets.
Reed has finished over 20% in target rate in all three seasons he’s been in Green Bay. He finished second in targets as a rookie (just two behind Doubs), and led the Packers in catches in 2024, despite getting out-targeted by Wicks (by one!). After the offseason extension, there’s no reason to expect his targets to fall off a cliff.
There’s no reason to expect LaFleur to use Reed in a much different way than in the past.
That would mean 85 targets for Reed, the second-most of his Packers tenure.
Let’s see the rest of the receivers aside for the moment because they’re trickier to figure out.
Dalton Schultz finished sixth in tight targets last year and had a 19% target share, which was 10th among tight ends, just ahead of Kraft. In the Kyle Shanahan offense, George Kittle regularly slotted between 20-25% target share, and Kraft is trending toward being that type of weapon for the Packers.
If Kraft got a 20% target share, that would mean 100 targets. That would have led the 2025 Packers, but for reference, Jake Ferguson and Juwan Johnson each went over 100 targets last season. That kind of volume is more than reasonable for Kraft.
It would be the most any Packers pass catcher saw in the Love era, but back in 2023, Doubs and Reed each went over 90 targets. What’s more, that same season, Kraft and Luke Musgrave combined for 86 targets when Musgrave entered the season as the starter.
Getting to 100 would represent only a modest increase in tight end usage from some previous LaFleur offenses. It’s also worth noting that Kraft finished eighth in target rate, which means when he was on the field, he was targeting more than his total share would indicate. This is a reflection of the egalitarian style of offense.
I think this is a much more useful way to look at boundary receivers in this offense now that the group has been streamlined.
For example, Christian Watson’s 19.9% target share jumps to 23.8% as a rate. In other words, when he’s on the field, he’s getting almost one in four targets from Love. If he’s all of a sudden playing more snaps, we wouldn’t need to see his rate jump for his share to move significantly.
If Watson got 22% of targets, that would be 110 targets, by far the most he’s ever seen in this offense, but a figure that would have been 26th in the NFL last season. It’s how many targets Jacobi Myers saw.
Watson is a much better player. If he’s healthy, getting to 100 should be no problem.
Now, what do we do with Golden? In this exercise, there are still plenty of targets to go around. The incumbent core has gobbled up 295/500 possible targets, leaving plenty of meat on the passing bone.
Josh Jacobs got 40+ targets each of the last two seasons, the backup running backs will get 20-30 over the course of the season, and Musgrave will likely get 15-20, so let’s call it 385/500.
The highest number of targets a Packers third receiver saw in the Love era is 75 targets, which would still leave a massive hole in the offense.
Golden earned an 11.8% target share last year, but for the first eight weeks of the season, when he was playing starter snaps, he finished 35th in yards per route run, ahead of guys like Michal Pittman, Jameson Williams, Devonta Smith, and AJ Brown.
In games he played at least 40% of snaps, he averaged 3.9 targets per game, which, rounding up, would mean 68 targets on the season. Getting to 75 would mean another extra target every other game. In an offense that already has Kraft, Reed, and Watson, that feels clean, and would still leave 40 targets for Williams, Melton, Skyy Moore, and the backup tight ends.
Of anyone, the numbers feel low for Kraft, who could easily get to 110 or more targets if he plays 17 games, but the Packers’ conservative handling of injured players suggests a slightly more modest approach.
This could finally be the season LaFleur and the Packers treat offense like the rest of the NFL. But the biggest question will be if it actually makes this team better, particularly in the playoffs.
The answer will rest on whether these players are as good as we think they can be.