I have been a Green Bay Packer fan since I could formulate a thought, although baseball and basketball were initially one and two in my affections because of the bigger-than-life radio personalities of Bob Uecker and Eddie Doucette. Football is far ahead of those sports now; a large part of the reason for this is because neither the Brewers nor the Bucks have had a “face of the franchise” for a very long time, someone whose success you could feel a vicarious connection to. Ryan Braun may turn out to be that player for the Brewers, depending upon his possible dependency on PEDs; but the Packers, mired in irrelevancy and mediocrity throughout the 70s and 80s, took the pedestal thanks to Brett Favre’s emergence. Favre arrived at an opportune time, on the heels of Robin Yount’s retirement, and he became the number one attraction in the state of Wisconsin, someone you could proudly say was your guy and no one else’s. This is why it was such a bitter pill of some of us to swallow when Ted Thompson and Co. shoved him out the door. I had a great deal of emotional capital invested in Favre as a Packer, far less than in Aaron Rodgers.
Thus I was not crushed when the Packers played a brutal game against the New York Giants, which could have been even more humbling had the team gone undefeated in the regular season. I wrote a month ago that the Packers, having escaped by the same 38-35 score over the New York Giants as the New England Patriots in 2007, ought hope they avoid seeing them again in the playoffs. Instead, it was déjà vu; like the Patriots that year—not to mention the Favre-led Packers in the NFC title game—their season was ruined. In 2007, the 10-6 Giants humiliated a 16-0 Patriots team, while this season a 9-7 Giants team did the same to a 15-1 squad. How could this happen? The fact is that many observers had the sneaky suspicion that the Packers were a bit of a fraud this year. They didn’t beat teams so much as outscore them, and when the offense couldn’t gather sufficient steam, you knew that it was only a matter of time before the defense blew apart. Too often the difference between winning and losing was who won turnover battle; the Packers had the best turnover ratio in the league during the regular season. But against the Giants, not only for the first time all season did the Packers had more turnovers than their opponent, but did so in dramatically disastrous fashion.
Unlike Tom Brady, Peyton Manning or Drew Brees, Rodgers was always capable of an absolute stinker of a performance where you were never under the impression that he was capable of saving the day. I don't buy the argument that he was rusty against the Giants; his back-up had a team record-setting performance after having thrown just 3 passes all season. I compiled in a previous post Rodgers’ Tim Tebow-like numbers from the second half of the Oakland game and the following week in Kansas City, where he seemed to be inert; perhaps some of this had to do with his receivers dropping balls as if they had grease on their hands, or an offensive line that seemed particularly porous against the Giants. Nevertheless, I never for a moment sensed that Rodgers would regain control of the situation against the Chiefs or the Giants as perhaps the true "elite" quarterbacks could. Many people criticized Favre's "gunslinger" mentality, but as he drolly observed after throwing a playoff record six INTs in a loss against the St. Louis Rams, "No risk, no reward." Rodgers, on the other hand, is a quarterback who thrives in good times, and appears lost in bad times.
I watched some of the game in the break room at work, and in the second quarter I found myself musing out loud that they should bench Rodgers and put Matt Flynn in the game. This won’t go down as the Packers best team after all, but it may be memorable for another reason: The year when another star quarterback in the making was revealed to the world.
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