When a player like Micah Parsons becomes available, you trade for him.
Football is rarely simple, but it’s simple that way. When a 26-year-old three-time All-Pro pass rusher becomes available, you do whatever it takes to get him. And the Green Bay Packers did just that, sending two first-round picks and defensive tackle Kenny Clark to the Dallas Cowboys for Parsons. Parsons would have been a steal, a godsend, a boon for pretty much any team looking to acquire him, but for the Packers in particular, Parsons is what the team specifically needed. I truly believe that if every single player in the NFL were available (contracts and quarterbacks aside), and the Packers could have traded for any single one … it still would have been Parsons.
Don’t get me wrong, the Packers’ defense looked great last season. After years of traditional schemes and passive play under coordinator Joe Barry, new coordinator Jeff Hafley breathed life into the unit, along with free agent safety Xavier McKinney and rookie linebacker Edgerrin Cooper. Green Bay’s defense ranked sixth in points per drive allowed and fourth in EPA per drive, largely on the back of an excellent takeaway game. It generated a turnover on 16.2% of their opponent’s drives — the third-highest rate in the league last season. And the Packers generated more than 111 expected points in takeaways — the seventh highest number of any team over the past five seasons. They didn’t just take the ball away a lot; they did it in high-leverage moments.
Hafley was the primary engine behind these turnovers. As the coach at Boston College, his defenses were fairly mundane: a lot of Cover 1 and Cover 3, a lot of four-man rushes and not a lot of deception. But out of nowhere, his first year as an NFL coordinator showed anything but that. The Packers deployed one of the league’s most creative and chaotic defenses last season, and to great effect.
But splash plays are just that — splashes. Huge plays that dramatically swing games. On a snap-to-snap basis, the Packers had a pass defense problem. It’s not easy to find, but it’s there.
When splitting the Packers’ snaps against dropbacks and against designed rushes, we can evaluate their defensive performance through two metrics: EPA and success rate. EPA provides weight to high-impact plays like turnovers, third-down stops and sacks. But success rate simply measures how frequently the defense had a positive play. And in success rate against dropbacks last season, they ranked dead last — the worst defense in the NFL.
Unweighting splash plays might feel silly, but it helps separate noise from substance. Despite the fact that every defensive coordinator prioritizes takeaways, turnover rates rise and fall season to season. If the Packers rolled with the same defense in 2025 that they deployed in 2024, an enormous swing in outcomes would rest in McKinney’s hands — literally. Green Bay’s pass defense gave up a 67.4% completion percentage (eighth worst) and allowed a first down on 35.4% of opposing pass attempts (seventh worst). Interceptions saved them.
The good news is that the Packers are not rolling with the same defense after trading for Parsons and awarding him a four-year, $188 million contract, to make him the highest-paid non-QB in NFL history.
It is important to say this clearly, as I’ve seen it debated and questioned over recent days: Parsons is without question one of the two best edge rushers playing football right now. In fact, he has probably been the best pass rusher since he entered the league in 2021 — yes, better than Myles Garrett. Parsons has generated pressure on 16.5% of his pass-rush snaps, easily above Garrett’s 11.9%.
And before you yell at me about double-teams: Parsons has been double-teamed on 30.6% of his pass rushes; Garrett is at 29.4%. Pressure numbers aren’t everything, of course, and the sack rate numbers are much closer (3.5% for Parsons, 3.3% for Garrett). I certainly believe Garrett gets more chip help against him as well. But if you wanted to argue for Parsons as the best pass rusher of this generation, it would be easy — and that’s before he gets a couple more seasons of his prime, while Garrett starts playing into his 30s.
So the Packers didn’t just get a great pressure player. They got an unquestionably elite one.
This is an enormous deal. The ever-creative Hafley was great last season at manufacturing pressure, in large part because the Packers’ personnel weren’t good at generating it. On four-man rushes with no second-level rushers — just four down, four rush — the Packers were 22nd in team pressure rate. Their only above-average defensive lineman in pressure rate was Rashan Gary, who got pressure on 13.4% of his rushes, the lowest single-season mark of his career.
That distinction is important: four-man rushes with no additional blitzers. Of course, most four-man rushes have no additional blitzers, but the few that send a second-level rusher fill a critical, growing niche in NFL defensive schematics. These plays were integral to the Packers’ team success last season. Green Bay ran more simulated pressures than any defense save for the Ravens, who have been on the cutting edge of this approach for the past couple of years.
What’s a simulated pressure? Different coaches categorize things into different buckets, but we can generally define it as a play where the defense shows pressure but ends up sending four or fewer rushers. With this approach, coordinators get the pre-snap advantage of a blitz look. They force offensive lines to change protections and force quarterbacks to keep running backs and tight ends in to help, tricking them into throwing hot — all while not losing any bodies in coverage.
Here’s a first-and-10 late against the Dolphins in Week 13 last season. Green Bay has a three-score lead with fewer than five minutes left, so it expects to see a dropback. Before the snap, defensive end Kingsley Enagbare (55) kicks inside so linebacker Isaiah McDuffie (58) can drop onto the line of scrimmage, presenting a five-down front. Watch the Dolphins’ left tackle and right guard point out the new man on the line, adjusting the protection to account for him.
— Good Clips (@MeshSitWheel) August 31, 2025
The five offensive linemen have the five down defensive linemen in protection but that’s not who rushes. Linebacker Quay Walker (7) blitzes down the pipe from depth, while Enagbare and McDuffie peel off the line of scrimmage and drop into zone coverage. Three Dolphins offensive linemen are left blocking the nose tackle while Walker screams down the middle practically unimpeded. Kenny Clark (97) cleans the play up. Sack.
This design has the effect of a blitz — occupying the pass protection to create a free rusher — without spending all of the resources. Yes, one of the bodies in coverage is Enagbare, a defensive lineman, but the Packers still have seven guys in coverage. Green Bay can play zone coverage with fairly traditional spacing. Only four teams played more zone last season than the Packers, in large part because they didn’t want to blitz (and have to play man coverage behind). They wanted to simulate the blitz (and get to play zone coverage behind).
Let’s spin this forward to 2025. While Parsons certainly doesn’t need simulated pressures to succeed as a rusher, Hafley can manipulate the front (and manipulate protection rules) with the intention of hiding Parsons from the protection slide or chip help.
Here’s another simulated pressure, in Week 14 against Detroit, from a really wonky front. Defensive tackle Devonte Wyatt (95) is isolated on one edge, while two edge rushers — Gary (52) and Arron Mosby (53) — are stacked beside one another on the opposite side, along with Clark. The Lions pick up this rush nicely, in large part because they feel comfortable leaving right tackle Penei Sewell in his one-on-one matchup against Gary, who ends up with a two-way go and plenty of space to rush inside or outside of Sewell.
— Good Clips (@MeshSitWheel) August 31, 2025
Now imagine if that two-way go belonged to Parsons, not Gary. Lest we forget about the last time Parsons and Sewell played: Parsons rushed against Sewell 18 times and generated five pressures. It’s the only five-pressure game a player has had against Sewell in the past three seasons. (In case I haven’t banged the drum enough yet: Parsons is so, so, so ridiculously good.)
When Parsons got a new defensive coordinator in Dallas last season in Mike Zimmer, there was some excitement that he might line up more often in the A- and B-gaps as a “spinner” — our football term for when a traditional edge rusher stands up in an interior gap. Spinners can be integral parts of these simulated pressure looks. Remember the viral clip of Garrett doing pre-snap dribble crossovers over the center? He was a spinner.
Parsons fosters this sort of excitement because of his background as an off-ball linebacker. But it didn’t really happen — he played 85% of his snaps off the edge, his highest rate of edge snaps in a season — and it won’t happen too often in Green Bay with these fronts, either. The point isn’t to place Parsons on the interior to stress protections. The point is to stress protections with the other guys to maximize Parsons on the edge.
With that said — man, it is going to be cool when the Packers use him on the interior. It’s not nearly the lion’s share of his snaps, but Parsons is ridiculously effective as an interior rusher. Since entering the league, he has had a pass rush win rate at defensive tackle of 33.7% (admittedly on only 32 attempts). For perspective, Chris Jones over that stretch is at 19.6%.
Watch Parsons lined up as the spinner-style rusher on this snap against the Ravens. Here, the front is designed to give Parsons a two-way go on the center. Tyler Linderbaum is excellent, but Parsons makes him look like me out there.
— Good Clips (@MeshSitWheel) August 31, 2025
The flow from Parsons to Hafley will accordingly go both ways. Hafley will scheme up fronts and (simulated) pressure packages that create good rush opportunities for Parsons, and he will scheme them up to take advantage of Parsons’ gravity in order to win somewhere else. Parsons has the prowess off the edge to demand more than one tackle’s worth of blocking attention, which limits an offense’s ability to send help to the pressure side. Plus, he has the versatility to move around the line, which makes it even harder for opposing offenses to game plan against Hafley. They’ll feed off one another.
But that isn’t where the Packers will benefit off Parsons’ game the most — not even close. They were already a good simulated pressure team without him, and because simulating pressure is largely a numbers game, they didn’t need an elite rusher to make it work. Recall: This team was 22nd in pressure rate on traditional four-man rushes. It’s the Packers’ base pass rush that needs the help!
Simulated pressures are designer defenses; they’re only available when you know what you’re getting, and as such, they are almost always called on long-and-late downs, when a dropback is nearly certain. It’s extremely difficult to call simulated pressures on early downs, as those packages include dropping a defensive lineman off the line of scrimmage. Imagine a first-and-10 handoff against a pressure that drops a DT off the line. Uh oh!
For this exact reason, the Packers were a dramatically different pressure team on early downs relative to late downs in 2024. They had a 25.9% pressure rate on first and second down, when their full menu of simulated pressures was not available to them — 10th lowest. On third and fourth down, they had a pressure rate of 39.7% — 10th highest.
But it goes beyond just the pressure rate. Remember, by success rate, this was the worst defense against opposing dropbacks last season. Green Bay got the splash takeaways, but from a down-to-down basis, it was susceptible. A critical Jenga piece falls when we remove the simulated pressures from the defensive system. Now, Hafley’s reliance on zone coverage (and the Packers’ lack of quality man coverage corners) forces the defense to become a bend-don’t-break unit that surrenders easy underneath completions. And without a strong four-down pass rush, good NFL quarterbacks can sit back and pick the zones apart further down the field.
The two Lions games — both losses, mind you — were perfect examples. Against that fearsome offensive front, which had no qualms leaving Sewell on an island against Gary, the Packers had early-down pressure rates of 16.1% and 14.3%. Unsurprisingly, these were also two of the three games in which they actually blitzed the most. They needed the extra bodies this time. If defenses couldn’t affect Jared Goff, they couldn’t really stop the Lions’ offense last season — and Green Bay rarely did in those two games. Goff nickel-and-dimed down the field with a 79.4% completion rate and 59% success rate.
Goff’s success rate on dropbacks were the third- and fourth-worst games the Packers’ defense surrendered last season. The two worst? The pair of games against Sam Darnold and the Vikings — both losses again.
There’s nothing schematically interesting to say about these games besides Green Bay got mollywhopped. Hafley’s defense was all about finding creative ways to succeed without elite corners or elite pass rushers, and the Vikings simply could not be outschemed. Darnold had a 91.1 QBR against man coverage in the first matchup (the worst QBR the Packers surrendered in man all season) and then an 81.1 QBR against zone coverage in the second one (the worst QBR the Packers surrendered in zone all season). Darnold rolled to a 74.6% completion percentage and 62% success rate.
That’s the thing about scheming up wins. Eventually, the other guys are really good at it, too. Whether it comes in divisional games (in which the Packers went 1-5) or facing playoff opponents (against whom Green Bay went 2-5 in the regular season and then lost in the first round of the actual playoffs), there’s a hard ceiling. Coordinators can’t win on the chalkboard anymore. That’s when the stars take over. And the Packers didn’t have enough stars on defense last season, plain and simple.
What’s cool and nerdy about the Parsons acquisition is how he gets used in the simulated pressure packages. But what’s important about the Parsons acquisition is the degree to which he elevates the Packers’ defense outside of the scheme. It’s how often he takes a boring ol’ first-and-10, dusts a tackle clean off the edge and puts the defense in second-and-long. Since entering the NFL, he is the best early-down pressure player by a country mile.
Detractors will quickly say Parsons sacrifices his run defense on the way to the quarterback. This is probably true. Since 2022, Parsons’ stuff rate is 2.6% (average for edge rushers is 3.1%) and his stop rate is 8.1% (average is 9.1%), according to NFL Next Gen Stats. He is below average, but not significantly — and certainly not significantly enough to hang the Cowboys’ run defense problems on him, when Mazi Smith and Osa Odighizuwa are the defensive tackles.
The run defense considerations are almost immaterial. The only reason we’re bringing them up is because Cowboys owner/general manager Jerry Jones said “run defense” about 142 times in his post-trade news conference. Of course the Cowboys needed to get better in run defense. It’s just a totally pointless endeavor if you trade arguably the best defensive player alive in the process. Of course the Packers need to dedicate more resources to their early-down run defense now that Parsons is on the field (and Clark is off it). But they are thrilled to do so because Parsons solves their base pass rush problem. He solves their Vikings and Lions problems. And he turns them from a defense that punches above its weight into a defense that punches against heavyweights.
The hay isn’t in the barn just yet. Parsons was a late add to the team and will take some time to get up to schematic speed. He’s going to be used creatively, and that requires trials; he’s going to be used in blitz and twist packages, and that requires chemistry built over time. And besides, the Packers’ cornerback room remains thin, even after the free agent signing of Nate Hobbs. I’m not convinced they’ll be able to play man coverage as much as they might like.
But last season proved the Packers have a legit defensive coordinator for the first time in years. And now they have a star defensive player — an unquestionably elite, blue chip, auto Defensive-Player-of-the-Year-candidate star. I’ll put my faith in this working. I’ll put my faith in a Super Bowl-caliber defense developing in Green Bay this season. And with an offense that has been approaching that crest for years now, there’s no reason Parsons shouldn’t see something the Cowboys never gave him: an appearance in the NFC Championship Game.
