GREEN BAY, Wis. — It’s not that Green Bay Packers coach Matt LaFleur wanted to lose anyone from his coaching staff, but when one of his position coaches retired and one of his coordinators interviewed for other jobs, a thought hit him.
It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to bring in some new ideas to his offense.
While offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich ultimately stayed with the Packers after interviewing for the Chicago Bears’ head coaching job and playcalling coordinator jobs with the Houston Texans and Seattle Seahawks, LaFleur (who calls the Packers’ offensive plays) still managed to make significant changes to the staff on his side of the ball.
He hired Luke Getsy to return in a full-time role as senior assistant, promoted Sean Mannion to quarterbacks coach and moved Connor Lewis from assistant QB coach to pass game specialist/game management.
“I think it’s great because everybody has different experiences and you want to encourage those guys to [come] up with new ideas or whatever it may be,” LaFleur said last week at the NFL’s annual league meeting. “And then we’ve got to figure out how it all fits. I think that’s always the trick, because we’re not short on ideas on our staff, which, that’s a good thing. But ultimately it comes down to how everything fits together and how you piece it together.”
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LaFleur is entering his seventh season as the Packers head coach. In his previous six seasons, he has had two offensive coordinators (Stenavich and Nathaniel Hackett) and two quarterbacks coaches (Getsy and Tom Clements).
Getsy originally worked for LaFleur from 2019 to ’22 before stints as an offensive coordinator with the Bears (2022-23) and Las Vegas Raiders (2024). He returned to the Packers late last season in a consulting role — working with the defense — after the Raiders fired him nine games into the season.
“I know he’s had a rough go of it the last couple years, but he’s a guy that I have a lot of respect for,” LaFleur said. “Not only as a football coach, but as a man. I think he does a great job. He’s extremely organized, really smart, I think he sees the game the right way. He’s brought a lot of cool ideas as we went through all our cut-ups and kind of discussed as a staff. So, he’s going to bring a lot of value to us.”
Clements retired after last season. LaFleur, anticipating that Clements might be nearing the end of his coaching career, brought in Mannion, a former NFL backup quarterback, last season as an offensive assistant to ready him for this promotion.
As much as Clements was a stickler for the fundamentals and had decades of experience coaching Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers, Mannion will provide quarterback Jordan Love with a different perspective as Love enters his third season as the starter. It’s the first time in his pro career that he’s had a former NFL quarterback as his position coach.
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“I think his experience, his ability to relate to that position, understanding what’s going through that guy’s mind. I think early on, even when I coached him in L.A., I thought eventually this guy’s going to be a coach,” LaFleur said. “So, he’s very, very proactive in his approach. He’s very well prepared, and I think he can help prepare our quarterbacks the same way.”
One of the worst things that can happen to an offense is for it to become stagnant, which makes it easy for defenses to catch up. While LaFleur’s offense has remained near the top of the league — the Packers have finished in the top 11 in total offense four of the past five years, including twice in the top five with two different quarterbacks (Rodgers and Love) — the team could be undergoing a shift toward more of a run-centric identity.
LaFleur relied more heavily on the run game last season after the addition of free agent running back Josh Jacobs, who rushed for 1,307 yards and helped the Packers to their highest ranking in rushing offense (fifth) since 2003.
“[I] think we need to be the kind of football team that can do what we need to do whenever we want, whether that’s running the ball, throwing the ball,” Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst said recently. “It wasn’t something where we say, hey, we sought out just to be a run-first team.”
