The Green Bay Packers are on a roll lately, having won three games in a row to improve to 5-3. Though the team appears to be coming together, the running game is still lagging.
The Packers are 26th in the league in rushing with 90.1 yards per game, despite being 17th in the league with 195 attempts. Second-year running back Alex Green has carried the load the past three games since Cedric Benson was hurt against the Colts in Week 5, and his teammates believe he hasn’t done well enough.
“Quantity is important – we want to have a certain amount of runs every game to keep them honest,” quarterback Aaron Rodgers said during his radio show with Jason Wilde on WAUK in Milwaukee this week, via the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “But I have to say the quality of them has not been anywhere where we’d like them.
“We’ve got to run the ball better,” Rodgers said. “If we can do that, then we are going to have the opportunity to make some of those play-action gains, make some of those gains with big plays over the top. Then you are going to see the runs in the fourth quarter pick up. That’s maybe the one area we haven’t been effective and haven’t had a bunch of. We have not been able to close out games running the football. So that keeps our attempts down. We haven’t been ahead by maybe two or three scores and kept those drives alive at times to give us even more attempts. So we have to do a better job in the quality part that goes along with the quantity of runs we get.”
Rodgers made his comments in the context of noting that he’s on pace for a career-high 594 passing attempts. He’s not the only Packers player who has said the running game needs work.
Google+
