The Green Bay Packers have spent the first six games looking like a defense that finally has some room to breathe. Under new coordinator Jonathan Gannon, they’ve opened the season 4-2, won three straight, and held opponents to 14, seven and 13 points over the last three weeks.
That’s a sharp turn from a 2025 season in which Green Bay finished with just seven interceptions. This year, the Packers already lead the NFL with nine picks, a sign that the defense is making more plays and, by the way it’s being described, playing with more freedom than it had before.
But the next stretch of the schedule is where that progress gets judged.
Green Bay has 11 games left, and seven of them come against teams that currently have winning records. The Packers’ remaining strength of schedule is listed as the seventh-toughest in the league, which means the early surge is about to run into a much less forgiving set of matchups.
That matters because the Packers have not been forced to live in the kind of run-defense stress that exposed them in Week 3.
Against Atlanta, Bijan Robinson rushed for 194 yards and two touchdowns. Since then, Green Bay has bottled up its last two opponents, the Bears and Cowboys, by getting out to big leads and forcing those offenses to move away from the ground game. That helped cover up a question that is still waiting to be answered: how well does this defense hold up when an opponent can keep running?
Jahmyr Gibbs is the next test.
Gibbs is averaging 100.8 rushing yards per game and has seven rushing touchdowns, and he also has at least four catches and 30 receiving yards in every game. He’ll also be coming off a bye, which only adds to the challenge for a Packers defense that will already be without Edgerrin Cooper for the year.
That leaves Green Bay’s linebackers and free-roaming defensive backs with a difficult assignment: keep Gibbs from turning the game into the kind of ground-and-space problem Robinson created in Week 3.
The Packers have earned the right to feel better about where their defense is headed. They’ve improved across the board under Gannon, and the results are showing up in the standings and on the scoreboard. The harder question is whether that version of the defense can survive what comes next, starting with a runner who can hurt teams on the ground and through the air.