GREEN BAY, Wis. -- Matt LaFleur didn’t mince words when the subject of the Green Bay Packers’ last two season openers came up.

“We got our ass kicked,” he said recently.

The Packers coach wasn’t trying to master the obvious. He’s trying to figure out how to not let what happened the past two years -- when the New Orleans Saints blew the doors of LaFleur’s team 38-3 in the 2021 season opener and when the Minnesota Vikings handled them relatively easily 23-7 in Week 1 last year -- happen for a third time.

As strong as LaFleur’s teams have been in his first four seasons, when the Packers won a combined 47 of 66 regular-season games, season openers have not been their strong suit. He takes a 2-2 Week 1 record into Sunday’s opener at the Chicago Bears (4:25 p.m. ET, Fox), but even the two wins (10-3 against the Bears in LaFleur’s first game as a coach in 2019 and 43-34 at Minnesota in 2020) didn’t come easily.

Even with all the work that has gone into reshaping the offense with Jordan Love at quarterback, don’t think LaFleur hasn’t studied season openers in depth.

“I’ve got my thoughts on it,” LaFleur said.

Thoughts that he said he wasn’t ready to share before the opener. Maybe the Saints loss had something to do with the game being moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at the last minute because of a hurricane in New Orleans. Maybe the loss to the Vikings had something to do with Aaron Rodgers not being ready for life after Davante Adams.

Whatever the reasons, it helped shape how LaFleur handled training camp and the preseason this year.

Every offensive starter except offensive tackle David Bakhtiari took snaps in preseason games. Part of that was to help Love acclimate. But every defensive starter, minus Jaire Alexander and Rashan Gary, played too.

“A lot of the discussion after the last couple preseasons with Matt and I have been, ‘OK maybe it’s time to do something different in preseason,’” Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst told ESPN. “Then certainly once we started putting the team together and it looked like it did, it was like, 'OK these guys really do need as many reps as we can get.' I think we probably played them even a little bit more just because of the makeup of our football team.”

Gutekunst’s concern with playing starters in the preseason was -- and always will be -- injuries. The Packers lost one sure-fire member of their 53-man roster, tight end Tyler Davis, to a season-ending knee injury in the preseason opener.

“Other than that, I did really like the way we went through preseason this year, and hopefully that will benefit us early,” Gutekunst said. “We’ll see, but I think we’re in a better spot than [we] had been in the past.”

Maybe a handful of snaps or a few series won’t change much, but to LaFleur, it wasn’t just about what happened on the field.

“I just think there’s something to going through and getting mentally prepared to go play a game, and doing that before it really counts,” LaFleur said. “I think that makes a big difference. We’ll find out. That’s a theory that I have. We’ll find out.”

Veteran defensive tackle Kenny Clark had not played in a preseason game since 2019 but was open to the idea because he thought it might help foster a better start to the season.

“I felt like it helped me,” Clark said. “At practice, you get it a little bit, that anxious feeling, but when you’re out there on the game field, it just feels different -- your breathing, all that kind of stuff -- I think that’s definitely going to help us that a lot of us played in the preseason.

“I was happy I did. I was out there breathing fast, breathing hard. You can’t simulate that. As hard as we go at practice, it’s different when you’re out there.”

“Different” was a word Clark used for the whole approach to training camp, which not only featured starters in preseason games but also included joint practices with two different teams (the Bengals and Patriots) for the first time in the same summer.

“I think the body of work we put in this offseason and in this camp has been different than in past years,” Clark said. “It’s definitely been a tougher camp for all of us. The schedule, just how we practiced, the physicality of practice, everything really. It was just different, different feel. I think that’s going to help us out going into this first game.”

The early part of the Packers' schedule seemingly isn’t the strongest. They open with six straight non-playoff teams from last season, beginning with Week 1 in Chicago. It gets tougher from there, so a good start might be paramount.

“Just from seeing [openers] in the past, it’s all about starting fast,” Love said. “I feel like that’s something we weren’t doing in the past, and it’s just kind of eye-opening that mistakes happen, and you’ve got to overcome those when they do happen. And I think that’s one thing that just kind of put us behind the [eight] ball in the past season openers. But we’re all ready for this thing to start. So I think all of our focus and attention will be there for Week 1.”