The Green Bay Packers seemed poised to take down the Chicago Bears on the road.
Then, Ben Johnson’s uber-aggressive coaching style got the best of Matt LaFleur, with the home team rallying back from a 21-3 halftime deficit. That’s not the first time LaFleur has gotten too conservative after jumping to a big lead. That cost the Packers multiple times this season and throughout his entire tenure with the team. Nevertheless, Micah Parsons still doesn’t want to hear anything about his coach being fired. If anything, that’s on the players.
Micah Parsons defends Matt LaFleur after playoff exit
The former Dallas Cowboys star admitted that LaFleur was a big part of what he wanted to be with the Packers. More than that, he thinks they just caught a bad break in the loss.
“You talk about do your job, right? You talk about coach, I mean this team put up … 27 points? In a playoff game, I’ve always told you, if my team puts up 21 points, we should win that game,” Parsons told ESPN’s Rob Demovsky. “We put up 27 points and we missed six, seven on special teams. That’s 34 points, and you’re talking about you want to get rid of a coach.”
Parsons also believes it’s up to the players to take accountability for how things went down.
“At one point, players have to have accountability. And that’s something that I’m challenging us as players that we need to take. We need to have accountability,” Parsons continued. “How do we let that game go? Like, coaching can only do so much. It’s about timeouts and Xs and Os — great. Sometimes, it’s about playing football at the same time.”
Despite the criticism and the big sample size of blown leads, the Packers reportedly still want to give LaFleur a contract extension. The roster needs some retooling and getting back to full strength, and they might have to find a replacement for defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley, a hot commodity in the head-coaching cycle. For now, however, it seems that LaFleur has the support of the locker room.