Packers 2025 Season Report Card: Grading Defensive Tackles

The Dallas Cowboys weren’t going to give away Micah Parsons. To land one of the best players in the NFL, the Green Bay Packers had to cough up two first-round picks.

And Kenny Clark.

The Packers sorely missed Clark, a fact reflected in our annual Packers report card. While Devonte Wyatt had four sacks, the rest of Green Bay’s defensive tackles combined for one. Clark had 44 pressures; Karl Brooks (25) and Wyatt (22) combined for 47 to lead Green Bay’s defensive tackles.

Our grades are done on a salary-cap curve because the financial component is such an important part of building a roster.

Note: All salary-cap figures are from OverTheCap.com. Advanced stats are from Pro Football Focus and Sports Info Solutions. PFF’s pass-rushing numbers are based on the 113 interior defensive linemen with at least 150 pass-rushing opportunities. Pass-rush productivity measures sacks, hits and hurries per pass-rushing opportunity.

Devonte Wyatt

2025 cap charge of $4.09 million ranked 50th at the position.

The 2022 first-round pick started 10 games, missing a couple midseason games with a knee injury before sustaining a broken fibula and torn ligaments in his ankle during the Thanksgiving game against Detroit. With that, Green Bay’s defense fizzled down the stretch. Wyatt had 27 tackles, including four sacks and six tackles for losses.

According to league data, the run defense was 0.06 yards per play better when Wyatt was on the field. The contrast was much starker in the pass game, where the defense was a whopping 1.10 yards per attempt better.

“You guys see the difference he makes when he got back out on the field. He’s a player you can’t replace,” Micah Parsons said on Thanksgiving.

After a quiet rookie season, Wyatt has 14.5 sacks the past three seasons. This year, he finished 14th in pass-rush win rate. That came on the heels of finishing 10th in 2024 and sixth in 2023. He was 21st in pass-rush productivity after top-four finishes in 2024 (fourth) and 2023 (second).

If Wyatt can stay healthy, he can be a star. That will be the key as he enters his fifth-year-option season having made 15 career starts. With that option, his 2025 salary will be a guaranteed $12.938 million.

“I know I got a lot more in the tank,” Wyatt said. “I feel like I got a lot more in the tank than what I put out there this year or the past three years. I know I have a lot more and I feel like this injury right here really is going to help me get above this hump, just showing y’all what I have.”

The grade is indicative of Wyatt playing 33.8 percent of the snaps, not what he did with those snaps.

Grade: C-plus.

Colby Wooden

2025 cap charge of $1.22 million ranked 107th at the position.

When Green Bay’s defense was humming through the first half of the season, “The General” deserved a salute.

“The nose, everything starts with the nose,” Wooden said. “The run game, the pass, everything starts with the nose. So, for me to be the nose, it’s kind of looked at like the general of the defense, hold it down.”

After starting only one game during his first two seasons and being a healthy scratch to start last season, the 2023 fourth-round pick started 16 games and played in all 17. He had 50 tackles and six tackles for losses; he had 37 tackles and three TFLs during his first two seasons combined.

Wooden is a nonfactor as a pass rusher. He didn’t have any sacks and wound up 91st out of 113 in pass-rush win rate and 109th in pass-rush productivity. However, the run defense was 0.13 yards per snap better when he was on the field.

Grade: B-minus.

Karl Brooks

2025 cap charge of $1.08 million ranked 122nd at the position.

Karl Brooks was a sixth-round pick in the same 2023 draft that produced Colby Wooden. After playing in all 17 games with zero starts during each of his first two seasons, he played in 16 games with seven starts in 2025.

He got a lot more snaps but had a lot less production on a down-to-down basis. After 20 tackles, four sacks and six tackles for losses as a rookie and 24 tackles, 3.5 sacks and four tackles for losses in 2024, he had a career-high 28 tackles but zero sacks and one TFL in 2025. His average tackle depth went from 1.8 yards in 2023 and 1.2 in 2024 to 2.6 in 2025, and the run defense was 0.06 yards per snap worse when he was on the field.

He was 50th out of 113 in pass-rush win rate and 83rd in pass-rush productivity.

Grade: C-minus.

Warren Brinson

2025 cap charge of $896,596 ranked 156th at the position.

The sixth-round draft pick represented the biggest investment at the position. He wound up playing just shy of one-fourth of the defensive snaps. He was a healthy scratch for the first four games and had two other games of single-digits snaps. However, he played more than 20 in each of the final seven regular-season games as well as the playoffs.

In 11 games (one start), he had 13 tackles, a half-sack and no tackles for losses. He would have had 1.5 sacks had his potential game-clinching sack of Caleb Williams in Week 16 not been nullified by his facemask penalty. 

There’s some juice there, so it’s easy to see why the Packers drafted him. He finished 25th in pass-rush win rate and 66th in pass-rush productivity. His average tackle came 2.0 yards downfield. The run defense was 0.20 yards better when he was on the field.

Grade: C.

Nazir Stackhouse

2025 cap charge of $845,000 ranked 165th at the position.

In 13 games (one start), Stackhouse was in on 12 tackles. He had no sacks or tackles for losses, and his average tackle came 3.6 yards downfield.

As was the case at Georgia, Stackhouse mostly was on the field on running downs. Of his 159 snaps, 97 were against the run. In 62 pass-rushing chances, he had four pressures. His pass-rush win rate of 4.8 percent was the lowest among the regular contributors.

That’s OK, though. Stackhouse was drafted to stop the run, which he did by being hard to move. The run defense was 0.56 yards per snap better when he was on the field – the best among Green Bay’s regular defenders.

Grade: C.

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Grading the 2025 Packers

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