Our Packers polling project entered its fourth year in 2022 and provided some interesting insights into what Packers fans thought about their team this season.

First and foremost, fan opinion is highly (but not exclusively) correlated with the team’s performance. Looking at the approval ratings for the five key figures on the Packers we ask about as well as the team as a whole, you can see a strong trend between how the Packers were performing and fan disposition.

Fan sentiment here is generally favorable toward all parties early in the season, dips strongly as the Packers spiral in the middle third of the year, and then rebounds as the Packers went on their winning streak late.

However, digging a little deeper, we can see that team performance doesn’t affect everyone equally. Joe Barry, for instance, did not receive the same benefit from the Packers’ late-season winning streak that everyone else did. Fan support for Barry remained low until the Packers’ thrashed the Vikings, and even after that, he only peaked at an approval rating of 20.9%.

Barry’s support is similar to that of Mike Pettine. Once fans soured on him, there was virtually nothing he could do to climb back into their good graces. It took an extraordinarily strong run of defensive performances from the Packers late in 2020 for Pettine’s support to rebound, and it all came crashing down after a particularly noteworthy meltdown in the 2020 NFC Championship game. I’m sure you remember.

The numbers from 2022 also seem to indicate some Aaron Rodgers fatigue. Fans are less forgiving of Rodgers’ poor performance in the past, and his approval rating dipped to heretofore unseen levels, bottoming out at a dismal 2.8% after the Packers’ loss to the Lions in Week 9.

Speculating a bit, it looks like fans turned on Rodgers after the 2020 season. That offseason we got the breaking news on draft day about Rodgers’ potential unwillingness to return to the Packers, which corresponded with a very low debut in his 2021 polling. Since then, his numbers have been a lot more flighty. However, it’s worth noting that he hasn’t been as good as he was in 2021 or 2022 as he was in 2020, even though he did win a second MVP in 2021.

As far as general manager Brian Gutekunst and head coach Matt LaFleur are concerned, their ratings seem to be the most closely tied to the team’s performance, which makes sense. Unless they make a truly remarkable screw up, their success is the team’s success and vice versa. LaFleur’s ratings are a bit more volatile, but fans do get a better week-to-week look at his impact on the team.

Long-term, Gutekunst and LaFleur both saw their lowest approval ratings ever in 2022, which is hardly surprising. Both fell in the eyes of fans as the team performed worse, and the pair rose and fell together. The only time we’ve ever really seen a significant split between the two came in late 2019 and throughout most of the 2020 season, which I attribute to some lingering resentment over the Jordan Love draft pick, though that’s just speculation.

Rounding out the figures on whom we poll, Rich Bisaccia is just wildly popular. Even though I’d say special teams weren’t overly special in 2022 outside of Keisean Nixon, Bisaccia still had the most consistently strong support on the team.

Bisaccia is easily the most popular of the three special teams coordinators in the LaFleur era. Just look at how he stacks up next to Sean Mennenga and Maurice Drayton. Between them, the only noteworthy support they ever had came via a late-season surge from Tyler Ervin in 2019. 

Finally, I enjoyed looking back on the polling data for the final question we ask in every poll: Will the Packers make the playoffs this season? Early on, fans were very confident the 2022 Packers would make the playoffs, but that support dwindled as the Packers self-destructed. As of Week 13, only 3% of our voters thought the Packers would make the playoffs, but heading into the ill-fated Week 18 game, more than 93% of the people we polled thought the Packers were headed for the postseason.

We do have one forward-looking note worth mentioning. In our season-ending poll, we asked voters if they thought the Packers would make the playoffs next season. Just 54% said yes. Is that a reflection of the disappointment following the Packers’ Week 18 loss, or an assessment of the likely state of the team next year? I guess we’ll find out in a few months’ time.