In 2025, the Green Bay Packers ran the most efficient intermediate passing game in the NFL, and it wasn't close to their 2024 version. Every throw between 10 and 19 air yards — the crossers, the deep digs, the seam shots to the tight end — generated 0.638 EPA per play for Green Bay, second in the league behind only Buffalo (0.654) and up from 0.435 in Love's 2024 season. That is a one-year jump of roughly 47%, in the exact bucket of the field where offenses live or die.

It's the reason Green Bay finished 3rd in the NFL in offensive EPA/play despite the fact that their running game was actively bad.

Table of Contents

1. The headline number
2. Love, ranked against the league
3. Where the intermediate game went from mediocre to elite
4. The committee: no WR1, a rookie, and a tight end doing the heavy lifting
5. The rushing game they didn't need

1. The headline number

Green Bay's 2025 offense finished:

• 3rd in overall offensive EPA/play (0.122)
• 1st in pass EPA/play (0.242)
• 19th in rush EPA/play (−0.015 — below zero)

That's a pass-only offense at the top of the league. And within the passing game, the downfield throws — every attempt of 10+ air yards — went for 0.679 EPA per play, which was 2nd in the NFL, one-thousandth of an EPA point behind New England (0.683) and comfortably ahead of Dallas (0.642) and Detroit (0.636).

2. Love, ranked against the league

Among the 15 quarterbacks with at least 200 dropbacks in 2025, Jordan Love led the entire NFL in EPA per dropback:

Love ranked 20th in the league in raw dropbacks, sandwiched between guys who ran the ball a lot more and threw a lot less. He completed 64.8% of his attempts, took sacks on only 4.3% of dropbacks, and threw six interceptions in 508 dropbacks. Stafford threw for two thousand more yards, and Love beat him in per-play efficiency by 0.032 EPA. Maye and Goff — the other MVP-conversation names — trailed by roughly the same margin.

3. Where the intermediate game went from mediocre to elite

Split the field by air yards and Green Bay's 2025 leap becomes obvious.

10–19 air yards (intermediate), team EPA/play, 2025:

Green Bay's intermediate EPA/play, by season:

That is a real, discontinuous jump — not a smooth trend line. Attempts came back up to 121 from 94, and the efficiency per throw exploded. The Packers were completing nearly 60% of throws in the toughest window in football to complete a pass, and turning almost every one that connected into a first down.

The 20+ air yard deep-ball number is good but not exceptional — GB ranked 6th at 0.741 EPA/play. And on short throws under 10 air yards, they were 4th (0.141 EPA/play), a healthy number but nothing like the top-of-league dominance of the middle of the field. This is a middle-of-the-field offense.

4. The committee: no WR1, a rookie, and a tight end doing the heavy lifting

Look at who caught the downfield targets and the pattern gets clearer. These are all Green Bay pass-catchers with at least 10 targets on throws of 10+ air yards in 2025:

Doubs led the group in intermediate volume, but nobody on this roster looks like a nominal WR1. Two things jump off the table:

• Rookie Matthew Golden was Green Bay's most efficient deep threat, generating 0.964 EPA per target on 14 throws of 20+ air yards. He led the group in overall 10+ air yard EPA per target (0.817) among the primary wide receivers.
• Tucker Kraft, the tight end, produced 2.302 EPA per target on eight intermediate throws. That's a ludicrous number in a small sample — but even his overall 10+ air yards figure of 1.885 EPA/target is the highest on the team by a wide margin.

The "1B" pieces — Jayden Reed and Luke Musgrave — also hit above 0.8 EPA/target on 10+ air yard throws. The way Green Bay attacked the intermediate area was to keep throwing it to whoever had the best matchup, and to trust a rookie and a tight end for the biggest per-target damage.

5. The rushing game they didn't need

None of the above was propped up by the run. Green Bay averaged −0.015 EPA per rush on 497 attempts, ranking 19th in the league — below Pittsburgh, below Dallas, below Cleveland by only a little, and well behind Buffalo's league-leading 0.110. Compare that to the Bills at #1 in intermediate passing and #1 in rushing, or Detroit at #4 in intermediate passing with a rushing game that finished 24th. Green Bay's version of a top-three offense was built almost entirely out of Love's arm and a downfield route committee.

Reading the tea leaves

The deep ball is fine — 6th in the NFL — and stats are muted (3,704 yards, 27 TDs, 508 dropbacks). The signal is what happens between 10 and 19 yards, where the offense went from below-average two years running to second in the league in one offseason, and where a rookie wide receiver and a tight end are producing per-target numbers you almost never see.

If the intermediate game is a repeatable skill — and there's a good methodological argument that intermediate accuracy is stickier year-to-year than deep-ball rate — then this Packers offense is more sustainable than the yardage totals suggest. If it isn't, then 2025 will look, in hindsight, like the outlier season it statistically resembles. I lean toward the former: the same quarterback threw for 0.100 EPA/play in 2024 and 0.253 in 2025, and the delta shows up in one very specific place on the field.