Packers' MarShawn Lloyd gamble is about to pay off

The Green Bay Packers knew there was a chance that MarShawn Lloyd was going to be their RB1 heading into the 2026 season.

That chance was there before Josh Jacobs was allegedly involved in a domestic incident in May, which led to his arrest. Even before that, it's worth remembering that Jacobs is a 28-year-old running back with a history of dealing with injury.

Lloyd as RB1 became more of a possibility after  Jacobs was formally charged with two misdemeanors stemming from the incident, and it became a certainty when the former All-Pro running back was placed on the commissioner's exempt list Sunday.

Speaking of injury-prone, Lloyd has 10 career snaps at the NFL level after the Packers selected him out of USC with the 88th pick in the 2024 NFL Draft.

He's battled through hamstring, hip, ankle, groin and calf injuries. Heck, he even had appendicitis.

Lloyd is absolutely unproven as an NFL running back, but the Packers are gambling that the traits they saw out of him with the Trojans will translate to the NFL level. They're also gambling that Lloyd can stay healthy, which has been a losing wager through the first two seasons of his NFL career.

“I’m a baller,” Lloyd recently said, per Matt Schneidman of "The Athletic". “You just gotta be ready whenever your number’s called.”

In the same breath, the 5-foot-9, 220-pound running back admitted that he hasn't been asked to carry the load for a team in a long time.

“I haven’t really had a high workload since high school,” Lloyd said.

Green Bay Packers gambling by placing trust in MarShawn Lloyd 

That's surely why the Packers traded a 2028 sixth-round pick to the Pittsburgh Steelers for 2025 third-round pick Kaleb Johnson, who was a star running back for the Iowa Hawkeyes in college.

Johnson is their backup plan to their backup plan, which was Lloyd. And yes, he does have some intriguing potential as a 6-foot-1, 224-pound bruiser; the true potential of Green Bay's backfield sans Jacobs exists because Lloyd is a guy who can do this: