Maybe it's not all bad news? I dunno.
It's official: the NFL season has begun. The Packers' Week 1 game isn't for another couple of weeks, but since we have our first full-blown injury panic, it feels safe to say that the year's truly underway. The team announced on Tuesday afternoon that AJ Dillon would be put on injured reserve with a neck injury, ending his season before it ever got started.
The good news? The Packers are paying another starting-caliber running back a lot of money! The analytics nerds are in shambles. Josh Jacobs has proven more than capable of being a team's first-string running back, and the depth even behind Jacobs is enough to not totally freak out about the possibility of now losing to the Bears. The bad news is everything else in this blog. The grayest of silver linings is that the Packers announced the move on a day where, like, 65% of running backs in the league became available, so there are some interesting ("interesting") depth options at their disposal. Here are a few.
3 AJ Dillon Replacements That Aren't Totally Unrealistic. Just kind of.
1. Frank Gore Jr.
A little SEO never hurt! Gore was supposedly pretty impressive with the Bills throughout preseason, rushing for over 200 yards and averaging almost six yards per touch – he had the highest overall PFF score of any rookie on the team. That wasn't good enough for Buffalo, apparently, and he was released on Tuesday. It's hard to put too much stock into preseason games, but he'd be an interesting name to have buried on the depth chart. Plus, if he's truly his father's son, he'll quietly play the next 20 years at a Pro Bowl level. Seems like good value to me.
2. Royce Freeman
Freeman had a decent camp with the Cowboys, who apparently are dead set on making the Ezekiel Elliot thing happen again in the year of our lord 2024. He's certainly bounced around the league since getting drafted in 2018 – the Packers would be his 6th team in as many years – but we're also talking about the very bottom of Green Bay's depth chart, so beggars can't be choosers. It wouldn't be a season-changing move, but there are worse ideas than bringing him in and letting him see if he can pass-block and do special teams stuff well enough to carve out a role for himself.
3. MarShawn Lloyd
Sometimes the best option is hiding right under your nose! Or at least, sometimes *an* option is hiding right under your nose. Lloyd was the team's third round pick this year, so it's not like it'd be all that surprising to see him contribute in meaningful ways this year. A hamstring injury kept him out for major chunks of the preseason, but he made the 53-man roster and wasn't put on any sort of injury restriction list. If Dillon's neck injury really means the end of his career in Green Bay, it's at least nice to know that the guy they planned to eventually replace him with is already on the roster.
