GREEN BAY — Matt LaFleur may be unwilling to speak ill of the NFL’s officiating crews, but the Green Bay Packers head coach’s over-the-top sarcasm about how much satisfaction he gained from the process of submitting questionable calls to the league office in the wake of last Sunday’s loss to the Detroit Lions sent a very clear message.
“Oh, it makes me sleep so much better at night,” LaFleur said Tuesday after a question about how he and his coaches went about inquiring to the league about some of the controversial penalty calls made in Sunday’s 20-17 loss to the Lions.
From highly questionable roughing-the-passer penalties on edge rusher Brenton Cox and defensive tackle Karl Brooks, to a phantom intentional-grounding flag on quarterback Jordan Love, to an inexplicable unnecessary roughness penalty on defensive tackle Devonte Wyatt on a play where apparently the whistle was never blown, the Packers had plenty to complain about.
LaFleur said he and the coaches submitted video clips of a number of plays — he would not say how many — to the league office, looking for clarity on why the calls were or were not made. He said it’s the team’s responsibility to submit a specific question and attach it to each clip.
“Obviously, we come up with the question, and then you get a response from somebody at the league office in regards to, ‘Yes, we agree with you,’ or, ‘No, we don’t.’”
LaFleur wouldn’t divulge which plays were submitted, but the aforementioned four were almost certainly among them. He said the team got responses from the league to some of the questions, but not all.
And if LaFleur wanted to share publicly what the league told him, he’d be subject to punishment from the league. The NFL recently scolded Los Angeles Rams coach Sean McVay for relaying to reporters that the league had told him a pass interference penalty that went against the Rams in their loss to the Denver Broncos earlier this season.
“We have heard back on some of it, but that [game] feels like a week ago,” LaFleur said, referring to the hyper speed turnaround to get ready for the Panthers. “It really doesn’t matter at the end of the day. You move on.
“I don’t think officiating in this league is very easy. I really don’t. I think things happen quickly, and there’s some bang-bang, split-second decisions you’ve got to make. So I don’t think they have an easy job. But all you want as a coach is consistency across the board. And sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t.”
While LaFleur bit his tongue in the immediate aftermath of the game, two-time All-Pro safety Xavier McKinney was a vocal critic of the officiating, using a lengthy, expletive-peppered soliloquy to sound off on what he thought was a shoddy showing from referee Alex Moore’s crew.
Love wasn’t as outspoken on Tuesday as McKinney had been immediately after the game, but he also emphasized the inconsistency as the core issue.
“The officiating … it is what it is. That’s kind of my mindset on the whole thing. You can’t change calls. There’s going to be calls you agree with. There’s going to be calls you disagree with. So it is what it is,” said Love, who has seen the Packers defense be flagged for eight roughing-the-passer penalties this season without drawing a single one himself.
“The hope is that calls are consistent, [that] you’re getting fairness throughout the game. Every game may feel like different crews [call it differently]. You wish there’s always consistency, but every crew calls things differently.
“My mindset is always, how can you overcome whatever calls happen? How can we be better as a team, cleaning up some of those areas that we might be getting called on, or consistently are having issues with? So it’s just, how can we be better? And just focus on that.”
–30–
COPYRIGHT 2026 BY CHANNEL 3000. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.