Tuesday Cheese Curds: Packers keep beating themselves

The Packers’ early-season struggles are turning into midseason struggles, and as injuries and uncertainty continue to mount, one thing remains true: the Packers are doing a lot of this to themselves.

As Matt LaFleur discusses in the link below, the Packers are making it hard to win. Between dropped passes, dropped interceptions, missed assignments on the offensive line, and just the general malaise that appears to be affecting the passing game, execution has been a big problem.

But the self-inflicted issues don’t stop there. Why did the Packers stick with Royce Newman so long? Why do they keep so few defensive linemen active on gamedays if they know opponents are going to try to run? Why did they hang so much of their offensive success on rookie wide receivers developing exceptionally quickly?

There are no simple answers to those questions, and the Packers haven’t seemed eager to answer them anyway. But those questions will be a big part of the post-mortem on the 2022 Packers, no matter where this season ends up.

Packers making it too hard on themselves to win | Packers.com

LaFleur rightly notes that many of the Packers’ problems are self-inflicted, but given how often the same problems seem to have cropped up this year, it’s easy to wonder how capable they are of fixing them.

Why Packers should stand pat at the NFL trade deadline | Packers Wire

After our Rcon14 made the case that the Packers should sell at the deadline, here’s another argument in favor of something similar.

Bengals, Chiefs Receivers Dominate NFL | Football Outsiders

The Packers’ receivers seem to be either hurt or struggling, but that’s not the case in Cincinnati or Kansas City.

NFL Week 8 Power Rankings 2022: 1-32 poll, stats to know | ESPN

The Packers are teetering on the brink of falling into the bottom half of the league in ESPN’s power rankings.

Message in a bottle hunter Clint Buffington uncorks a mystery | UPI

It never occurred to me that you could make a hobby out of finding messages in bottles, but this guy claims to have collected more than 100 since 2006.