Who are the worst passing teams of the last three years? The Browns are the obvious and correct choice as the worst passing attack, and you won’t hear arguments from many if you include the Texans, Ravens, and 49ers in that group. Those four teams have all averaged 5.7 or fewer net yards per passing attempt since 2015, the simplest measure of passing efficiency.

But the fifth-worst team over the last three years is a shocker: it’s the Green Bay Packers. Yes, Aaron Rodgers missed most of last season (and Brett Hundley was terrible in his stead), but you may not remember that the Packers offense had a lot of struggles in 2015 playing without Jordy Nelson, who has been very instrumental to Rodgers’s success. Yes, Rodgers had his always glowing TD/INT ratio in 2015, but he ranked 32nd out of 36 qualifying passers in NY/A that season.  And Rodgers’s struggles creeped into September of 2016, too, before he finally turned things around.

Still, we think of him as Aaron freakin’ Rodgers, so it’s jarring to see that — even with half a season of Hundley — Green Bay ranks in the bottom five of any passing stat.  To be sure, NY/A has always been Rodgers’s weakest stat, since his TD rate and INT rate are what have buoyed his success. So let’s instead look at Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt, a stat that Rodgers remains the career leader in since 1970.

The graph below shows the trailing 16-game ANY/A average of the Packers passing attack over each 16 game period beginning with the 16th game of the 2008 season (Rodgers’s first as a starter).  The Packers line is in green and yellow; the league average is in black.  As you can see, things are not trending in the right direction, and even as of the middle of 2016, the T16G average was pretty ugly:

In 2018, the expectation is that Rodgers will once again be one of the very best quarterbacks in the NFL. That was certainly the case most of the time from 2009 to 2014, but since then, it has not. More than anything, that’s been brought about by a large decline in NY/A, which has mostly been due to a drop in yards per completion. Since 2015, there have been 36 passers to throw at least 500 passes, and Rodgers is one of just six to average 11 or fewer yards per completion. The other five: Carson Wentz (who averaged a pitiful 10.0 yards per completion as a rookie before jumping to 12.4 last season), Eli Manning, Brock Osweiler, Sam Bradford, and Joe Flacco.