As the Packers try to avoid going under .500 for the first time this year, they’ll need plenty of things. One thing they could use is leadership from within the locker room.
But as Michael Cohen and Tom Silverstein of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently explained it, the Packers currently don’t have clear leaders in the locker room.
After Sunday’s loss to the Colts -- the third time in less than a calendar year that Green Bay lost at home when favored to win by a touchdown or more -- only defensive lineman Mike Daniels blew a gasket in the locker room. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers, admittedly not a “rah-rah” guy, opted instead to subtly question the energy level of his teammates and coaches during the loss to Indianapolis.
“A-Rod is not a vocal guy, so we don’t really look for him to be vocal,” linebacker Jayrone Elliott said, via Cohen and Silverstein. “He leads by example. [Julius Peppers] does the same thing. Clay [Matthews] does the same thing. So we don’t really have many vocal leaders besides like Mike Daniels, Josh Sitton when he was here, T.J. Lang.”
As noted by Cohen and Silverstein, the outburst from Daniels apparently didn’t move the needle, which means that his strong words aren’t translating to actual leadership.
“For me, after a loss, yelling is not going to do anything at that point, you know what I mean?” an unnamed player told Cohen and Silverstein. “That’s not the right time to do it. Of course everybody is pissed off that we just lost. If somebody is going to yell, it needs to be the coach. The coach needs to yell. Mike Daniels is going to do what he wants, though. It used to bother me but now I just close my ears to it.”
The question is whether there’s anyone on the roster to whom the players will open their ears, and whether those who are in a position to lead by word instead of example will choose to. Rodgers presumably wants to match the accomplishments of players like Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. To get there, Rodgers may need to decide sooner than later that he needs to impose his will in the moment, not with a gesture or a smirk or a look of resignation as he yanks at his chin strap but a shout or a scream or something else aimed both at getting the attention of his teammates and to immediately coax a higher level of performance out of them.