The Green Bay Packers entered the offseason with a roster full of young, ascending talent and a sour taste from how their 2025 season ended. Now, Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer thinks that combination points somewhere very specific.
Breer compared this year’s Packers to a team that just walked the exact same path all the way to a Super Bowl title: last season’s champion Seattle Seahawks.
“The Packers are very much, to me, where the Seahawks were last year,” Breer wrote in his training camp takeaways for SI.
Albert Breer Compares Packers to Last Year’s Champion Seahawks
The foundation is the young core.
Breer pointed to a receiver room with Christian Watson and Jayden Reed locked up on extensions and 2025 first-round pick Matthew Golden rounding out the group. Jordan Morgan is settling in at left tackle, and defenders Devonte Wyatt and Edgerrin Cooper both landed new deals this offseason.
Add a healthy Micah Parsons and Tucker Kraft, plus a Jordan Love who plays up to the organization’s expectations, and Breer sees a roster with real juice.
“There’s a lot to like here,” Breer wrote.
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So what’s keeping Green Bay from Seattle’s ending their season surrounded by confetti? Breer named two specific things: health and a jump from a handful of players.
The health part haunted the Packers last season. Kraft tore his ACL in an upset loss to the Carolina Panthers. Parsons tore his in a Week 15 loss at the Denver Broncos. They didn’t win again, dropping four straight to close the regular season before blowing a 21-3 lead in a wild-card loss to the Chicago Bears.
Losing arguably their two best players in Parsons and Kraft explained much of the collapse. But Breer argued Green Bay also needs a few young players to jump from good to great, the way Seattle got improvement from the likes of Charles Cross, Kenneth Walker III, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Devon Witherspoon and Byron Murphy Jr. on its title run.
“Can Watson and Reed and Morgan and Wyatt and Cooper reach another level?” Breer wrote. “Could safeties Xavier McKinney and Evan Williams be part of that equation too, the way, say, Leonard Williams was last year for the Seahawks? If so, I think the ceiling is pretty high on that roster.”
The health questions are still very present.
Parsons, who tore his ACL in December and had a meniscus cleanup, opened camp on the PUP list and may not make his 2026 debut until sometime in October. Kraft returned to practice in early August and looks to be trending toward at a Week 1 return, while Wyatt avoided PUP entirely after his own season-ending injury.
If all this happens as Breer described, this year’s Packers team could finally be one that puts it all together under head coach Matt LaFleur. If they don’t, they risk another year of unmet expectations.
Obviously, Breer believes the talent is there to make it all happen. Green Bay just has to prove it can climb the same mountain the Seahawks did.
Easier said than done.
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