GREEN BAY – The Packers' defense is going to miss Devonte Wyatt, but the hope is his absence in the middle of Green Bay's defensive line can be compensated for in the aggregate.
Wyatt, the fourth-year pro, was "definitely playing the best ball of his career," Head Coach Matt LaFleur said Monday, when he went down with a season-ending ankle injury late in the fourth quarter of the Packers' Thanksgiving win in Detroit.
In starting 10 of the first 12 games, Wyatt had four sacks and six tackles for loss, proving to be a disruptor as both a run defender and pass rusher.
A first-round draft pick in 2022, Wyatt was really coming into his own as an every-down player and became a veteran his young defensive linemates have looked up to since Kenny Clark's departure in the Micah Parsons trade.
Now, the unit has to move on without him, as his ankle injury requires surgery and will keep him out of game action until next season.
"Yeah, it's tough, but that is the nature of our game," LaFleur said. "Certainly he's a guy that's going to be pretty tough to replace. I think it just falls on everybody else kind of raising the level of their game."
Three players in particular come to mind.
Third-year pro Karl Brooks is working his way back from an ankle injury that's limited him the past couple of weeks and forced him to miss the Lions game. Brooks had regularly been playing three dozen snaps or more per game until the injury.
Also, rookies Warren Brinson and Nazir Stackhouse – who both hail from the same Georgia Bulldogs program as Wyatt – will see their workloads increase as well.
"We just gotta do our job," said Brinson, a sixth-round pick. "It's time to be next man up and it's time to grow. We're not rookies no more.
"We're just trying to work, trying to get better."
Brinson is the more effective pass rusher of the two rookies and had been earning more playing time lately after being a gameday inactive for most of the season's first half.
In just 21 snaps two games ago against Minnesota, Brinson was credited by NextGenStats with five QB pressures as well as the first half-sack of his career.
Stackhouse is more of a run stuffer and has played anywhere from three to 27 snaps in any given game, clogging the middle and minding those gaps.
While the Georgia teammates could be lining up next to each other on occasion now, just like old times, their focus is on minimizing any drop-off up front without Wyatt.
"It's real tough," Stackhouse said of Wyatt's injury, for which he was carted off Ford Field. "In the moment I was just hoping it was something minor. But it's hard. It's hard to see something like that, especially someone you've been playing football with since freshman in college."
Unfortunately, Lukas Van Ness' return to the defensive line doesn't appear imminent. After missing five games due to a foot injury, Van Ness tried to play against the Vikings but lasted only a handful of snaps and had to exit. He then sat out the Detroit game and is back to rehabbing his injury.
However Wyatt's workload gets shared, the run defense piece of the equation will get the most attention this week, as the Bears visit Lambeau Field coming off their 281-yard rushing output at Philadelphia on Black Friday.
Running backs Kyle Monangai (22 carries, 130 yards, TD) and D'Andre Swift (18-125-1) both topped 100 yards in Chicago's convincing victory over the defending Super Bowl champs, and the Bears racked up all those rushing yards with only 13 coming from their quarterback, Caleb Williams, who's a running threat in his own right.
"It's gotten a lot of people's attention," Stackhouse said of how the Bears are running the ball.
They currently rank second in the league with 153.8 rushing yards per game, barely behind Buffalo at 155.7. No one else in the NFL is averaging even 140 rushing yards per contest.
"It's a credit to really everybody," LaFleur said of Chicago's ground game. "Their offensive line, they've certainly added some pieces up front. Those tight ends, they block their (butt) off, and the receivers get involved in the run game as well.
"It's a collection of all those guys. It's going to be a great challenge because they're the best in the league right now in doing it."
