The Green Bay Packers take on the Minnesota Vikings during Week 16 of the 2019 NFL season.
In a normal NFL season, there would be a few terrible teams, a few dominant teams and a large clump in the middle vying for the playoffs. We can usually tell the contenders from the pretenders using point differential, how often they blow out opponents and advanced stats like DVOA and EPA. In any other season, I would label the Packers as lucky overachievers based on all of these, and maybe they are, but this isn’t a normal season. There’s not much of a middle class in 2019, and that makes it more difficult to judge a team’s true quality. Every elite team in 2019 has fattened up on poor competition, including Green Bay, but in beating the Vikings on Monday, the Packers showed that they are legitimate contenders.
Usually, dominant teams win most of their games by multiple scores, while the mark of a lucky pretender is a good record in one-score games. Decades of statistics tell us that one-score games in the NFL are essentially coin flips, and that a team that gets lucky in such games one season nearly always crashes back to Earth the following season. The Packers have been lucky this season, with a 4-1 record in true one-score games (8-point wins are a bit of a grey area), however they haven’t been as lucky as their NFC contender counterparts. The Saints, held by many to be at least the second-best team in the conference, is 6-1 in one-score games, and Seattle, who is still alive for a first-round bye and the number one overall seed, is a ridiculous 9-1 in close games.
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The 49ers are who they are, and despite recent struggles, are likely the best team in the NFC, but everyone else is as questionable than Green Bay if not more so. The Vikings were probably the second-best team in the lead-up to last week’s contest against Green Bay, but the Packers put that notion to bed with an impressive win. The fact of the matter is there is nothing stopping Green Bay from a deep Super Bowl run as long as they can hold on to their first-round bye by defeating Detroit.
Getting Hot
Aaron Rodgers continues to play at a slightly above average level, and the offense can be a real problem outside of the running game and Aaron Jones. Fortunately, that running game, plus a conservative offense that doesn’t turn the ball over, can work with a good defense. For the vast majority of the season, the Packers simply did not possess such a defense, but if we look more carefully, there are three reasons for guarded optimism entering the playoffs.
The first is health. While the Packers seem perpetually snake bitten by injuries, they are among the healthiest teams in the league this year, and their defense has benefitted more than any other unit, which brings us to the second reason. Kenny Clark is no longer playing through whatever ailment he suffered through earlier this year and is back to his old dominant self.
Clark’s health, combined with transcendent play by Za’Darius Smith and Preston Smith, has allowed Mike Pettine to limit blitzing. Against Minnesota on Monday, the Packers sent more than four rushers only once, and with extra bodies in the secondary, Kirk Cousins was completely confused. The Packers even managed to get to him on a few three-man rushes with Clark opening up lanes for creative stunts behind him. Succeeding without blitzing is the key to any dominant defense, and while it’s premature to call them dominant at this point, this was their fourth dominant game in a row.
The previous three were against the poor offenses of Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C., and there was good reason to be skeptical. Those performances now look very good, especially when paired with the early season defensive performances against Chicago and Minnesota, when the team was also healthy.
The third big factor is the ascension of both Chandon Sullivan and Ibraheim Campbell as secondary depth, and as “big nickel” defenders. The Packers can be vulnerable to the run when they go light, but recently, the Packers have found success as they did early in the year before Raven Greene was lost. Campbell, in particular, seems to excel in this role, though he has been used sparingly. Sullivan is called on for coverage responsibilities more often, but he has strung solid performances together for several weeks.
Sometimes, teams get lucky and fall back to the pack. Sometimes, as the Packers did in 2010, they are able to right the ship during the season and use a little luck to catapult themselves to bigger and better things. It’s hard to see this coming, and often it sneaks up on fans and the rest of the NFL. The offense still give me pause, and if they do go down, the passing game will likely be the reason, but it’s possible they have defense figured out. If they do, the sky's the limit.
