Bears poised to hammer Packers’ long-ignored roster weakness

Football games are a series of choices. Run or pass. Go for it or punt. This personnel group or that one. You know the drill.

But those choices extend far beyond what actually happens within the game. Football games are indeed a series of choices, but those choices are affected by the teams themselves — which are little more than a long series of choices executed over years and years of careful, or sometimes not so careful, roster construction and manipulation.

Such is especially the case this weekend in Chicago, where the Bears are well-positioned to take advantage of one of the Packers’ most conspicuous roster-building choices: essentially ignoring the defensive line.

You’ve probably heard more than enough about Ben Johnson by this point in the season. For a guy whose career accomplishments peak at “assistant coach on two division championship teams,” he’s had an awfully lot to say for himself. But glib insults aside, Johnson does one thing really well: construct running games.

In four seasons of calling plays dating back to his time with the Detroit Lions, Johnson’s teams have consistently excelled on the ground. His Bears are third in the NFL by DVOA on the ground this year, and the Lions ranked second and fourth in that metric in 2024 and 2023. Only in 2022, his first season as an offensive coordinator with the Lions, did they rank outside the top 10 in rushing DVOA, clocking in at 12th overall.

When he took over as the Bears’ head coach, Johnson clearly had one mandate for the front office: fix the offensive line. And they did. They spent lavishly, trading for guards Joe Thuney and Jonah Jackson, signed center Drew Dalman in free agency, and drafted tackle Ozzy Trapilo in the second round this spring. The Bears wanted to fix their offensive line, and they did.

Consequently, the Bears run the ball well both inside and outside (and, for what it’s worth, reduced Caleb Williams’ sacks significantly, though his growth as a quarterback helps with that, too). By EPA, they’re the NFL’s second-best team running to the outside according to data from Sumer Sports, but there the Packers are poised to counter. The same data has the Packers as the NFL’s ninth-best team at defending outside runs, and we’ve seen that in games this year against the Lions and other teams with speedy backs trying to go outside. Quay Walker and Edgerrin Cooper, among others, have been more than up to the task.

But the Bears also are content to pound away inside. Sumer Sports’ data has them as the NFL’s 6th-best inside running team by EPA — and the Packers are just 26th in the NFL at defending inside runs.

There’s an obvious reason for this: the Packers have essentially no remaining NFL-caliber interior defensive linemen. And they chose to be this way.

Dating back to 2018, when Brian Gutekunst took the Packers’ general manager job, the Packers have spent exactly one top 100 draft pick on a defensive lineman. That was Devonte Wyatt, whom the Packers selected 28th overall in 2022. The only other defensive linemen selected by the Packers in the top 150 in Gutekunst’s nine drafts have been Kingsley Keke in 2019 (150th overall) and Colby Wooden in 2023 (116th).

That strategy left the Packers already perilously thin heading into this season. After adding just one more day three defensive linemen in this spring’s draft (Warren Brinson), the Packers entered 2025 with Wyatt and Kenny Clark as their top interior line options. Wyatt was coming off  a solid season in 2024, but Clark, thanks in part to a foot injury sustained on bad turf in Brazil in Week 1, had the worst season of his career and was already well into his 30s. There was already a lot hanging on that duo — and then they traded Clark as a part of the Micah Parsons deal.

Now, even with Parsons on the shelf now, I’d still make that deal 100 times out of 100, and I suspect you and Brian Gutekunst would, too. But the Packers added an elite pass rusher in part at the expense of their already thin interior defensive line, and things have only gotten worse. Wyatt got hurt, returned, and then got hurt again, and his replacements have either been ineffective (Wooden, Brinson, Karl Brooks, Nazir Stackhouse, Quinton Bohanna) or injured themselves (Jordon Riley). It’s left the Packers with little choice but to re-sign one of their own castoffs, 2022 draft pick Jonathan Ford, who was himself released by the Bears.

Put simply, the Packers are in position to get run over by the Bears because they’ve consistently chosen not to add any depth on the defensive line. And to be clear: not all of the choices that led the Packers here are bad. Relying on Kenny Clark for so long was a good thing; he was a good player. Trading him was equally wise; they had a chance to get a great player for a guy who wasn’t going to be in Green Bay beyond 2025 anyway. But Gutekunst and the Packers consistently chose to do very little beyond that, and now those decisions are coming home to roost in the Wildcard Round.