Green Bay is 2-2 and it needed a Tampa Bay meltdown to get there. The Packers beat the Buccaneers 17-14 on the road, and the defining sequence of the afternoon belonged to the team that lost.
With 4:26 left in the fourth quarter, Jordan Love went deep left for Matthew Golden and Jacob Parrish picked it off at the Tampa Bay 7, returning it 8 yards to the 15. Tucker Kraft made the tackle. That handed the Buccaneers the ball on their own 15 with 4:26 to play. They never scored. Tampa Bay's last real snap was Jalon Daniels throwing short middle to Ted Hurst III, intercepted by Keisean Nixon at the Green Bay 43 and then overturned to an incompletion on replay. The Bucs got the break and did nothing with it.
So the story here isn't a Packers win. It's a Packers offense that managed 17 points against a team that's now 0-4.
Love finished 22 of 30 for 197 yards, two touchdowns, one interception and a 98.9 rating. He was sacked zero times. Clean pocket, 30 attempts, 197 yards. That's 6.6 an attempt, and very little of it downfield. Against a winless opponent, Green Bay asked its quarterback to manage the game, and he managed it well. That is not the same as winning one.
The backfield is the real alarm. Five Packers carried the ball. Kaleb Johnson led with 8 carries for 42 yards and a long of 31, and he lost a fumble. MarShawn Lloyd ran 7 times for 13 yards and caught 5 passes for 36. Chris Brooks turned 4 carries into 30 yards. Matthew Golden took one carry for 6, and Love lost 8 yards on 4 carries. Nobody in that group gets the volume that makes a running back startable, and Johnson's 31-yard run is doing a lot of work propping up his day. I'm not starting a Green Bay back next week. Neither should you.
Tucker Kraft is the one piece of this passing game I'll roster. He saw 7 targets, caught 6 for 42 yards and scored. Matthew Golden matched him with 7 targets but turned them into 3 catches for 21 yards, and a touchdown is the only thing rescuing that line. Christian Watson caught all 3 of his targets for 47 yards and still isn't getting enough of them. Mark Redman had 2 for 29, Jonnu Smith 1 for 19, Skyy Moore 1 for minus-2, and Bo Melton and J. Michael Sturdivant each saw a target and caught nothing.
Tampa Bay's problem runs deeper than 0-4. Jalon Daniels is both the passing leader and one of the rushing leaders, which tells you what this offense is right now: a quarterback improvising because nothing else moves. Bucky Irving, Sean Tucker and Tez Johnson all got carries around him. That's bad for Irving's ceiling and worse for Daniels' body.
The Packers sit at 2-2 with an efficient quarterback, a backfield by committee and exactly one trustworthy pass catcher. Beating a winless team by three isn't a step forward, it's a warning. Throw 30 times for 197 yards again next week and Green Bay loses.
