If you already thought the NFL was a nickel league, you haven’t seen anything yet.
While new Green Bay Packers defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley hasn’t ever called his own defense at the NFL level, there are hints as to what he might want to do on the field with the green and gold. At both Ohio State and Boston College, his two stops since he left the San Francisco 49ers in 2018, he’s run defenses that major in single-high coverage — a staple of the Seattle Seahawks/49ers tree that he hails from.
From a personnel perspective, though, who will be on the field? At this point, you’ve probably heard that Hafley will run these single-high coverages, Cover 1 and Cover 3, but how will he decide which players can actually get the job done?
The Packers’ coaching staff has said several times this offseason that they’ve studied two teams in particular, the 49ers and Houston Texans, on defense. The Texans, notably, hired away former San Francisco defensive coordinator Demeco Ryans to be their head coach last season — if you’re not getting the connection here.
In 2023, both San Francisco and Houston ranked in the top six NFL teams in terms of nickel snaps played. Meanwhile, they ranked 28th (Texans) and 32nd (49ers) in dime defense. In fact, San Francisco never played a snap of dime last season.
Comparatively, Green Bay still “majored” in nickel defense, as they played 67.7 percent of their snaps with five defensive backs on the field per Pro Football Focus, but they did it in a little bit of a different way. Unlike the 49ers and Texans, who truly play with two edge rushers, two interior defensive linemen and two off-ball linebackers in nickel, the Packers often played nickel out of their “Penny” front, which we’ve written about in the past. The Penny front is the team’s base 3-4 personnel on the line of scrimmage with one of the off-ball linebackers subbed out for a slot corner.
Green Bay ran their 3-4 base 25.7 percent of the time and their Penny defense 8 percent of the time, meaning that they had a “Bear” (three interior defensive linemen between the tackles) front on the field for over a third of their plays last season. If you compare that to base defenses, the Packers would have ranked third in the league in 2023, behind just the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Pittsburgh Steelers.
So while you might think that Green Bay could be willing to play more base defense under Hafley because they’re turning in a 300-pound defensive lineman for a 230-pound off-ball linebacker, all of the signs point to the opposite being true. The Packers leaned so heavily into three-interior defensive linemen looks under Joe Barry that it’s highly likely that the team will end up playing more sub-packages — nickel specifically — this upcoming season.
This will stress test Green Bay’s nickel cornerback even more, both in the run game and the passing game, as he’ll be asked to be on the field more against the run and will have to play more man coverage against the pass. Last season, the Packers’ Keisean Nixon, who is currently being paid like a top-three nickel, was already the second-most-played slot defender in the entire league. If you’re looking for an X-factor this season, keep an eye on how Green Bay plays in the slot, as all signs point to the team leaning hard into that being a full-time role.
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