The way things are going for the teams I grew-up rooting for these days, I might take a second look at the local teams and my alma mater instead of my usual “meh” attitude toward them. Former hot shot quarterback prospect Graham Mertz has been mostly a bust for the Badgers, while my old college’s football team—after a couple of decades of inconsequential play since winning the national championship—are after upset wins over Florida and Alabama suddenly #3 in the AP poll, although in two weeks they have to play #1 Georgia on the road. We’ll see if they are still worth more than a “meh” then.
In the meantime, the Packers win over Tom Brady and the Buccaneers seems more and more “meh,” after the Buccaneers lost 21-3 to a 1-5 Panthers team for their fourth loss of season. Old Tom should have listened to his wife. For Aaron Rodgers and company this is shaping up to be their worst season record-wise since Rodgers’ first season as a starter, but even that season showed promise because seven of the Packers’ 10 losses were by four points or less. This season, a thrice 13-win team has already lost four games the first seven weeks of the season to teams they were favored to beat, and given that the Packers’ offense is looking worse every week, expectations for this team looks to be tanking too after a 23-21 loss to the Washington Commanders that was actually a lot worse than that.
Entering the game, we were told that Rodgers has been suffering from a sore thumb, which I suppose explains why he is averaging less than 10 yards per pass completion and thus far career low 6.6 yards per pass attempt. In this game, he at least got his passes off; the Commanders apparently had more focus on stopping the run (which wasn’t hard, because the Packers only ran the ball 12 times), while Rodgers was sacked zero times and just one QB hit; however that obviously didn’t equate to positive movement, because Rodgers only passed for 46 yards in the first half. After scoring a short-field touchdown to take a 7-0 lead in the first quarter, the offense was non-existent until a touchdown with 3:26 to play.
In between, the defense finally made an opportunistic play with a 63-yard interception return for a touchdown to make it a 14-3 game:
But Amari Rodgers’ muffed punt leading to the field goal…
…and a fumble recovery ran in for another touchdown was called back for an illegal contact penalty was a 10-point swing right there:
Was it “necessary”? It sure looked like both players were grabbing at each other, and even though that action had nothing to do with the play call, it allegedly occurred when the quarterback was still in the “pocket.” We are told the NFL rules committee has been upset by the failure to call many illegal contact penalties, and officials have been warned they need to call “more.”
The Commander’s quarterback, Taylor Heinicke, was last year’s starter, but he hadn’t played a down coming into this game. Unlike Rodgers, he did his game-managing best thanks to the defense’s typical inability to control good running games. Oh, wait, isn’t the Commanders’ running game one of the worst in the league, averaging 95 yards coming into this game? Those defensive players pumping each other up before game time sure didn’t translate on the field as it gave up 364 yards of offense (167 on the ground), and a critical third-and–nine conversion late in the game when the Packers needed that stop.
Still, the offense was awful for the most part, gaining only 232 total yards, and most of those on the last two possessions; yet surprisingly the Packers were one time out away from at least attempting a game-winning field goal. Apparently the Commanders were playing “prevent defense” when the Packers got the ball back on their 18-yard-line with 23 seconds to play and no timeouts, because Rodgers was suddenly able to connect on back-to-back passes reaching the Commanders 32-yard-line, but time had already run out; amazingly, the Packers almost scored on the final play lateral, but after some tossing around, Rodgers got the ball and threw the ball across the field to a wide open Darnell Savage, but the ball fell between his legs and out-of-bounds:
Unfortunately, the flag that was thrown was likely against Rodgers, who appeared to throw the ball ahead of—instead of behind—the would-be receiver, so a touchdown wouldn’t have counted anyways.
Next up is another eminently losable game at the Bills, and the Packers can either see this as an upset bounce-back game, or another one for the loss column that shows a team still offensively not a playoff caliber team. To be honest, they didn’t look like they had that kind of team last year against the 49ers who could only score 13 points at Lambeau Field, and even with the Packers having some guy named Davante Adams on the team they couldn’t muster even that much. This isn’t one of those R-E-L-A-X seasons; if the Packers don’t somehow start rising from the dead real quick, this is going to be a lost season just as quick.
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