Matt LaFleur’s seat just got a lot warmer. The Green Bay Packers were blown out 35-14 by the previously winless Atlanta Falcons on Thursday Night Football at Lambeau Field, dropping Green Bay to 1-2 and thrusting its head coach into the middle of the NFL’s hot-seat conversation entering Week 3. LaFleur did not sugarcoat it afterward, calling the loss “a butt-whipping.”
The result was especially jarring given the opponent. Atlanta entered the night 0-2 and had been widely viewed as one of the league’s worst teams through two weeks. Instead, Bijan Robinson ran for 194 yards and two touchdowns, Drake London hauled in 194 receiving yards, and the Falcons piled up 498 total yards in a home-opener rout that saw Lambeau Field fans booing the Packers off their own field. Asked about potential changes to his coaching staff, including the offensive line, LaFleur declined to answer, telling reporters, “I’m not even going to respond to that question.”
How LaFleur Landed on the Hot-Seat List
CBS Sports’ Tyler Sullivan had already placed LaFleur at No. 7 on his NFL head coaching hot-seat rankings entering Week 3, grouping him alongside Tampa Bay’s Todd Bowles and Indianapolis’ Shane Steichen among coaches facing the most pressure early this season. The Falcons loss only intensified that scrutiny. Former NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho went further on his “Speakeasy” show, saying LaFleur “shouldn’t be on the hot seat, he shouldn’t have a seat,” and declaring “the Matt LaFleur experiment has come to an end.”
LaFleur is 77-42-1 across eight seasons in Green Bay dating back to 2019, a record that stacks up favorably against most of his peers on paper. But the deeper issue is the postseason: the Packers have made the playoffs six times under LaFleur yet are just 3-6 in the postseason, with no playoff win in either of the last two years. Packers president and CEO Ed Policy had publicly dismissed hot-seat talk after signing LaFleur to a contract extension in January, but a stumble to 1-2 with a lopsided home loss to a winless team is exactly the kind of result that reopens those questions. Adding fuel to the fire, former Packers quarterback Kurt Benkert posted during the Falcons blowout that “Brian Flores should be the Packers’ next head coach,” naming the Minnesota Vikings’ defensive coordinator, whose unit had already beaten Green Bay in Week 1, as a potential successor.
A Discipline Problem Compounding the Losses
Green Bay’s struggles this season go beyond one bad night. Through two weeks, the Packers led the entire NFL with 26 accepted penalties and 231 penalty yards, five more accepted fouls than any other team in the league, according to team and league penalty tracking. That penalty rate has been described as one of the most undisciplined stretches for the franchise in decades, and it has shown up in critical moments in each of Green Bay’s first two games. LaFleur has acknowledged the offensive line issues specifically, saying, “right now I don’t know what we’re doing well offensively” when pressed on the front five after the Falcons loss.
What the Betting Markets Are Saying
The oddsmakers have already started pricing in Green Bay’s shaky start. Green Bay opened the offseason as short as +1400 to win Super Bowl LXI at some books, drifted out to the +1600 to +1800 range by midsummer, and by late September sat around +3000 to +3500 to win it all at major sportsbooks – a notable softening in the Packers’ championship equity even before Thursday’s loss is fully priced in. The team’s NFC North division odds and NFC odds have followed a similar trend, with Green Bay no longer viewed as the clear-cut favorite in a division that also includes the Detroit Lions and Chicago Bears.
Green Bay’s regular-season win total, which opened around 10.5 in the offseason, had already been bet down to 9.5 by market-makers before Week 1, with the under carrying juice as bettors leaned toward a step back from last year’s playoff team. A 1-2 start with a blowout loss to a team many had projected among the league’s worst is the kind of result that tends to keep total-win unders in play and Super Bowl futures drifting further in the wrong direction for Green Bay backers. With a road trip to Tampa Bay looming in Week 4, the Packers now face pressure not just to win, but to show the market their preseason expectations were not miscalculated.
