So what are the Green Bay Packers now? Overrated? Underprepared? Unlucky? Unfazed? Flukes? Flops? Human?
One game seems to have changed so much about the Packers. The Super Bowl champions who couldn’t lose for a year have lost twice in a month. And Sunday’s once-unthinkable 37-20 meltdown against the New York Giants is an unforgiving prism, one that casts a rainbow of different perceptions on the Pack.
Were they a great team dealt a bad hand? Were they a great team that devolved? Were they true favorites who simply met the proverbial “hot team,” this year’s version of last year’s Packers? Were they an average team that got on an amazing one-year roll? Are they 15-1 or a team that can’t win a home playoff game? Do they need major overhauls or minor tweaks?
These are the serious questions that general manager Ted Thompson and friends must answer. After the Super Bowl run, the mantra for Packers was “In Ted We Trust,” and the Lombardi Trophy was his scepter of sovereignty. Suddenly, judging from radio and Twitter, there’s another mantra challenging the throne: “Can We Trust Ted?”
It’s not exactly breaking news that sports fans can have rather short memories, but the suddenness of all this doubt seems rather, well, sudden.
Then again, Sunday’s game was a car wreck, and car wrecks do cause whiplash.
Perhaps it’s just a case of the Packers spoiling their fans. For a year, they made everything look so easy that you forgot that the NFL is a meatgrinder. And the danger of looking so perfect is that flaws come into much sharper relief.
And yes, this is a team with a few flaws, the most obvious one being its porous defense. When they were successful, the Packers could cover up the blemish, powdering it by creating turnovers, distracting your eye with flashy offense. But the blemish remained, and fixing it will be Thompson’s highest priority. On a smaller scale, there’s also the matter of stabilizing the offensive line, and perhaps investing in some stick-um to keep footballs attached to hands.
But that the Packers could succeed for so long in the face of those deficiencies speaks volumes about the state of the franchise. Ted Thompson is indeed still trustworthy. He did not build this team on the strength of foolishness, nor did he morph into a fool overnight.
And yes, Mike McCarthy still coached the Packers to a Super Bowl. And Aaron Rodgers still played his way to the top of the quarterback charts, not to mention a few State Farm commercials.
When the raw emotions subside, I suspect Packers fans will take a second look at their team and be very happy with what they see. And when a new season begins, they’ll be rightfully optimistic about how that season will end. Back to back Super Bowl titles is no longer on the table, but the prospect of two out of three ain’t bad.
So what are the Packers now? I have a guess.
Hungry.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter, where I tweet as howiemag. And listen to me chat sports with Mitch Teich once a month on WUWM’s “Lake Effect.”
