​Now that our top plays are in the books, I want to offer one final coda to our look back at last season. 2025 was genuinely ridiculous. In the conclusion I wrote about our top play of the year, I noted that everything after Keisean Nixon’s interception to seal the Week 14 win over the Bears feels almost forgettable. I am not denying the merit of my colleague Tyler Brooke, who rightly celebrated Matthew Golden’s playoff touchdown against Chicago. That play should have been the clincher, and yet we all know what happened. Nixon’s interception still reads like the season’s last true high point, and that feels absurd. A campaign that opened 9-3-1 shouldn’t have its brightest moment in Week 14. That’s a silly twist for Packers fans to live with.
And it wasn’t the only ridiculous aspect. From 2022 to 2025, Brian Gutekunst painstakingly built a deep, exciting group of wide receivers, only to see the entire unit stay unhealthy for most of 2025. Jayden Reed began the year banged up, endured further injuries, and never quite found his footing. By the time Christian Watson returned from ACL rehab, Matthew Golden was dealing with his own dinged-up status. Even when the top options were on the field, third-round pick Savion Williams missed most of the season with a serious injury. Williams might not have been a season-altering difference maker, but it still stings that we saw so little of him. And beyond that, it’s frustrating that the Packers’ top five receivers were never healthy at the same time; part of why Golden could even have a chance to score his playoff touchdown was because Dontayvion Wicks was in the concussion protocol. It’s dumb.
And not all the dumbness is tied to injuries. I don’t want to belabor the point, but it’s pretty ridiculous that Matt LaFleur spent so much of 2025 trying to mold the Packers into a power-running squad, only for it to fail. The offensive line couldn’t sustain it. Josh Jacobs wasn’t healthy enough to shoulder the load. It simply wasn’t working. It’s ill-advised to chase a identity that doesn’t fit, and it’s even dumber to persist with it once you know what you are.
But injuries and the chaos they spawn deserve their own focus. They help explain why the ground game never got clicking. The line was nearly as unsettled as the receiving corps. To be fair, the Packers’ offensive line likely wasn’t going to be a dominant unit in 2025, but we never truly had the chance to judge them properly. Zach Tom went down early, followed by Aaron Banks. By the time the band-aid fixes began to take shape, Elgton Jenkins was approaching the end of his season with another injury. Then Zach Tom’s second injury—this one far more serious—against the Broncos effectively closed the door on any cohesive line play for the year. Any progress the Packers had hoped to make on the line evaporated in a puff of injuries and misfortune.
All told, 2025 was a year of unwelcome randomness: a season that promised upside but delivered inconsistency and calamity in nearly every phase. The top moments came late, the health setbacks were relentless, and even the attempts to pivot toward a different style of play collided with reality. It isn’t just one broken plan; it’s a cascade of broken pieces that left us reflecting on what could have been, and accepting that what actually happened wasn’t what any of us expected when the schedule rolled out.