A 30-point loss on the next-to-last game of the regular season rarely inspires a great deal of confidence in your team’s chances of doing much in the postseason.
Sometimes a loss like that is enough to make you want your team to miss the postseason altogether and avoid the nationally televised embarrassment.
The Green Bay Packers have already qualified for the playoffs, though, so there’s no slipping out the back door on this one. The Packers, preseason favorites to win it all, at this point must be facing some serious introspection on whether they’re genuine Super Bowl timber.
Can they still pull it together, as quarterback Aaron Rodgers suggested after last week’s 38-8 loss to Arizona?
More to the point, has any team ever got jack-rolled by 30 points on its next-to-last game of the regular season and then regrouped in time to advance to the Super Bowl?
No, but there was a Super Bowl team that lost its next-to-last game by 40.
Weird as it sounds, the NFC champion Arizona Cardinals of 2008 were drop forged by New England to the tune of 47-7 in their 15th game. The week before that unholy pounding, they had lost by three touchdowns to the Vikings. Those defeats were not taken as harbingers of great things to come.
Yet, behind veteran quarterback Kurt Warner, the Cards won their finale and caught fire in the NFC playoffs, winning three close games and advancing to a thrilling Super Bowl against Pittsburgh, won by the Steelers 27-23 in the final 35 seconds.
So, while it is true that you want your team to be playing great ball in December, it’s an even better deal to have them playing their best in January.
After last week’s demoralizing setback in the desert, are the Packers capable of a similar turnaround?
The answer is a definite maybe. The line between success and failure for the Packers this season has been fiber-optic thin. Recall the last-play win in Detroit, or the close victory over San Diego.
The 30-20 win over Oakland on Dec. 20 came thanks to a couple of touchdowns scored or set up by the defense. Last week it was Arizona’s defense scoring twice and making the difference.
More so than in most seasons, parity throughout the NFL this year is widespread. The any-given-Sunday bit has seldom been more evident.
This topsy-turvy nature was demonstrated most recently by the Atlanta Falcons, who gave previously undefeated Carolina its first loss, two weeks after losing to the same Panthers 38-0.
How does one explain the mighty St. Louis Rams, who handed the Cardinals one of their two defeats and knocked off Seattle twice, but are still under water with the rest of the league at 7-8?
In seeking answers to what is wrong with the Packers after last week’s debacle, it’s instructive to start with this: They lost. Note how the mountains crumble and the heavens are toppled when the Packers take it on the chin, but how it’s all good when they’re running over Dallas or thrashing Minnesota, or pulling one out of thin air to stun the Lions.
It’s the same in every city with an NFL franchise. Everything is relative in the zero-sum setup of a 16-game season. Basically, it boils down to win, or tell it walking. Packers coach Mike McCarthy called the loss to Arizona “ugly.”
Another word to describe that game is “over.” What happens from here on in is the reason Packer fans have been paying attention since training camp opened.
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