The Packers have to get serious about field goal protection

I’m sure that the people who want special teams Rich Bisaccia fired won’t have their minds changed by this article. It won’t matter that I bring up that the Green Bay Packers ranked second in starting field position and fifth in opposing starting field position last year. In their minds, Bisaccia is a bust no matter what the data says. Special teams can only do bad, unless there’s a big return (something the Packers don’t seem to have interest in investing in — more on that later).

With that being said, Bisaccia’s units haven’t been good for the first four games of the year. On the subject of the field goal team, and really special teams personnel overall, though, I want to turn the gun to another target: head coach Matt LaFleur.

As someone with a little special teams experience (I coached and played it at the high school level and evaluated it as part of my time with the XFL), I’ve talked to a lot of special teams coaches over the years, at varying levels of the sport. One of the consistent pieces of advice that I received from successful special teams coaches is this: “Your primary job is convincing the head coach to let you use the best players on the team for the kicking game.”

Not too long ago, cornerback Richard Sherman was the jammer on the Seattle Seahawks’ punt return unit while also putting up All-Pro seasons on the defensive side of the ball. Now, LaFleur’s Packers won’t even let All-Pro returner Keisean Nixon, who also starts at cornerback, get time on punt return or kick return. Instead, Bisaccia’s units are using Matthew Golden, who hasn’t returned punts since high school, and Savion Williams, who hasn’t returned kicks since his true freshman season at TCU in 2020, as their main returners. Against the Cowboys, Golden was benched for Romeo Doubs, who got his first punt return opportunity in four years as an NFL player in Week 4.

There’s no doubt in my mind that not using Nixon is a call that LaFleur made, not Bisaccia. And I don’t think that Nixon is the only player who is being restricted by the head coach, either.

Just look at the field goal unit that the Packers fielded on Sunday for their blocked PAT against the Dallas Cowboys.

Going into Week 4’s action, Green Bay’s preferred field goal protection unit included Aaron Banks, Zach Tom and Anthony Belton, three offensive linemen who were out with injuries against Dallas, and tight end Tucker Kraft, who is often sidelined for a rest snap. Instead of bringing up Elgton Jenkins, who hadn’t played a snap of special teams in 2025, up on the field goal unit to start the game on Sunday, the Packers elected to use two backup tight ends and Brant Banks, an offensive lineman who was signed to the active roster from the practice squad just this week.

The result? Luke Musgrave, one of the backup tight ends playing the wing, stepped too wide while in protection and opened up a wide gap on the outside of Banks, who did his job by taking on the interior threat. Again, you can’t convince me that Bisaccia wanted to use these reserve players in this situation. Ultimately, it comes down to the head coach to decide on the special teams personnel that the coordinator is allowed to use. I’ve never heard of an instance where a special teams coordinator voluntarily gave up a better player to give him some rest for another coordinator’s unit. They might understand why a head coach would make that call, but they’re never the ones to suggest it.

How did Green Bay respond to this block, their second in two weeks? They finally broke the seal and allowed Kraft and Jenkins to join the unit, on top of bringing defensive tackle Karl Brooks out for field goal action for the first time this year. Those backups — Musgrave, tight end John FitzPatrick and Banks — were immediately ripped off the field and never came back.

The result? Another kick was never a threat of being blocked for the remainder of the game.

The Packers pivoted to playing their best field goal protection unit too late. It ended up costing them two wins that wound up being a loss and a tie, but they eventually got the right players on the field. Now it’s up to LaFleur to actually let Bisaccia use these players every game, every snap moving forward. If not, we shouldn’t expect different results. Hell, Musgrave is a third-year player already, and field goal protection is hardly ever live in practice, if it’s even done outside of a walkthrough in a hotel ballroom during the week. At this point, why should we ever expect Musgrave to get any better when the simple rule of “step down and take the inside threat first” still hasn’t registered 886 days after he was drafted by the team in the second round?

It’s time to get serious about field goal protection, and that means getting the correct players on the field to help you win games. If this wasn’t a wakeup call for LaFleur, I don’t know what it would take for him to actually deploy his full starting offensive line in the kicking game.