What's Wrong with Eddie Lacy?
Supported by the highest-rated passer in NFL history and a great defense, there were incredibly high hopes for third-year Green Bay Packers running back Eddie Lacy entering 2015. The 2013 second-round pick averaged 5.2 yards per rushing attempt during the final seven games of his sophomore NFL season and was expected to pick up even more steam at the age of 25.
Six weeks doesn't make a season, but it's safe to say that Lacy has fallen well short of those expectations as we approach the midway point of the 2015 campaign.
Lacy is averaging just 3.9 yards per carry, which is 0.7 yards lower than his 2014 average and ranks 25th among the 37 backs with at least 50 attempts. Six weeks in, 22.4 percent of his rushes have gone for zero yards or a loss, which is up from 19.1 percent in 2014. And he's gained 10-plus yards only 10.4 percent of the time, which is down from 15.4 percent last season.
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| Yards/game | 96.8 | 57.2 |
| Yards/carry | 4.4 | 3.9 |
| Touchdowns | 24 | 1 |
His per-game receiving numbers have also been cut in half, and after scoring 24 touchdowns in the first 31 games of his career, he's found paydirt just once in six weeks this season.
As a result, Lacy's coming off a game in which he was essentially benched for backup James Starks. He carried the ball just four times in Sunday's victory over the San Diego Chargers, marking the first time in his career in which he's had fewer than 10 rushes while healthy.
| Week 6, 2015 | 4 | 3 | Outplayed by backup |
| Week 2, 2015 | 3 | 9 | Injured in 1st quarter |
| Week 2, 2013 | 1 | 10 | Injured in 1st quarter |
| Week 13, 2013 | 10 | 16 | Team was blown out |
| Week 5, 2015 | 13 | 27 | Couldn't find daylight |
What's going on with a guy whom many selected early in the first round of fantasy drafts but is now on pace to rush for fewer than 700 yards? Some possibilities...
He's hurt
He wasn't listed on the Week 6 injury report, which is bizarre because Packers head coach Mike McCarthy noted on Monday that Lacy is "beat up."
He did miss the vast majority of Green Bay's Week 2 victory over the Seattle Seahawks due to an ankle injury and had only 10 carries on 31 snaps the next week against the Kansas City Chiefs, so it's fair to wonder if—despite his absence from the injury report—Lacy is far from 100 percent.
Still, being banged up is part of the job, and that hasn't stopped Lacy in the past. Even if you remove Week 2 from the equation, he's averaging just 35.4 offensive snaps per game, which is well below his averages of 49.3 from 2014 (when he was limited early by a concussion) and 48.4 from 2013 (when he was hampered by another concussion as well as a balky ankle).
The major difference this year might be that the Packers are really feeling the 29-year-old Starks, who had 24 touches and 106 yards from scrimmage in relief of Lacy in Week 2, carried the ball 17 times the next week against Kansas City and was too hot to leave on the bench Sunday against San Diego.
"We're a one-two punch team," McCarthy said of the duo after Starks seized the primary role Sunday by rushing for 91 yards in the first quarter, per Michael Cohen of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "It's really no different than the way we operate. We went with James first just because he's been playing extremely well, and Eddie has been a little banged up."
In other words, we may be witnessing a bit of a Wally Pipp.
There have also been questions regarding Lacy's conditioning. In the same breath above, McCarthy denied that being an issue, and there's no actual evidence that the already hefty Lacy gained weight in the offseason or came into 2015 out of shape.
We'll give him the benefit of the doubt there for now, but it's a factor to consider if he continues to struggle and lose ground to Starks.
Tough schedule
In Lacy's defense, the Packers have gone up against some stingy defenses since he scored his only touchdown of the year and accumulated 99 yards from scrimmage in Week 1 against the Chicago Bears.
- The following week, Lacy was injured early against a Seattle team that ranked second in football with an opponent yards-per-attempt average of 3.4 in 2014 and ranks fourth with a 3.6 mark this season.
- Despite being hobbled the next week, he still managed to average 4.6 yards per carry on 10 attempts against a talented Chiefs front seven that has also surrendered just 3.6 yards per rush this year. In that game, Starks had just 32 yards on 17 carries.
- He also had a strong performance (18 carries for 90 yards) Week 4 against the San Francisco 49ers, while Starks struggled (nine for 28).
- He struggled in Week 5 (13 for 27) against very strong, swarming St. Louis Rams front seven, and so did Starks (five for 17).
- And he never really had a chance to get going with Starks on fire against a bad Chargers D in Week 6.
So maybe luck just hasn't been on Lacy's side. But it won't get a lot easier, because after their Week 7 bye the Packers take on solid defenses in Denver, Carolina and Detroit.
A lack of continuity from the offensive line
While quarterback Aaron Rodgers has been as good as ever, there's evidence that issues with the right side of the offensive line and the tackle positions have hurt Lacy's productivity.
During his first two years in the league, regular offensive line starters missed a total of three of a possible 160 individual starts, and Green Bay had the same starting line in 15 of its 16 regular-season games in 2014.
But this year, right tackle Bryan Bulaga has already missed three games due to a knee injury, and the veteran struggled with his run blocking when he returned Week 5. And his replacement in Weeks 2, 3 and 4, Don Barclay, was an absolute train wreck in the running game.
Here he is getting manhandled and backed into Lacy's running lane in Week 2:
Again, he's left in the dust as Lacy has nowhere to go on a one-yard loss against Kansas City:
And against San Francisco, Barclay is beat right off the snap as Lacy loses a yard:
Examine the tape and you'll see that time and again, which explains why Pro Football Focus has given Barclay a run-blocking grade of minus-11.6, which ranks dead-last in football among 77 qualified offensive tackles.
It also didn't help when right guard T.J. Lang missed most of Week 5 due to a sprained MCL, and it certainly hasn't helped that—while Lang, Josh Sitton and Corey Linsley have generally been good inside—left tackle David Bakhtiari is ranked 65th by PFF with a run-blocking grade of minus-4.4 (although Bakhtiari has never been much of a run-blocker).
So it shouldn't surprise anybody that when it comes to what Football Outsiders calls adjusted line yards, the Packers rank in the bottom 10 in football when running outside of both tackles, while ranking above the league median when running up the middle.
Per PFF, Lacy and Starks have just 25 yards on 11 carries when running outside of the right tackle, but the returns haven't been much better going left. Far too often, we've seen Bakhtiari get killed at the line of scrimmage, leaving Lacy dead in his tracks.
An example from San Francisco:
Point being, he's seen far too many looks like this one against St. Louis, which resulted in no gain:
But it does have to be noted that Starks has been running behind the same line, and he's averaged an extra half-yard per carry on essentially the same number of attempts.
It does help that a healthier Starks was able to pad his stats against a poor Chargers run defense, but the tape still reveals that he's been the better back. Lacy still had a few opportunities like this one against San Francisco:
He had an opening there but stuttered and wound up with no gain, which is uncharacteristic of a player of his ilk. And even when he didn't have gaping holes in the past, Lacy was able to make do. He broke 49 tackles on 288 touches last season, which works out to a rate of 17.0 percent. This season, he's breaking tackles on only 9.2 percent of his touches.
Meanwhile, Starks turned this into a 10-yard gain against the Seahawks:
And this into a five-yard gain through a tight hole in the same game:
And after some improvisation, he turned this into a seven-yard gain:
Finally, this became a pickup of 35 yards:
He's a slow starter
For now, Lacy is stuck platooning with a six-year veteran, but there's a lot of time for that to change. In fact, now that he's been given some time to heal some mysterious wounds, it might only take one vintage performance for the Alabama product to return to stardom.
And Lacy hasn't typically been a fast starter. He failed to rush for 50 yards in each of his first four games last season and averaged just 3.0 yards per carry during that stretch, which was the fourth-lowest mark among 31 backs with at least 40 attempts.
And in his rookie year, he averaged a tepid 4.0 yards per rush in his first six games before exploding with three performances featuring 150-plus yards from scrimmage during the final 10 weeks.
It hasn't been an ideal start, but Lacy realizes he's less than halfway through this marathon.
Brad Gagnon has covered the NFL for Bleacher Report since 2012. Advanced stats courtesy of Pro Football Focus.
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