Aaron Rodgers has been medically cleared to play, according to his instagram account.

If the Green Bay Packers remove him from injured reserve, he can play immediately this Sunday against the Carolina Panthers. The Minnesota Vikings are his opponent the week after that.

Rodgers suffered a broken collarbone against the Vikings earlier this year after a hit from Anthony Barr, and required surgery to repair it — unlike his last collarbone injury, which did not require surgery.

The Packers do have an outside shot at the playoffs if they go 10-6 and win out the rest of their schedule. It would require that that a number of teams — Detroit Lions, St. Louis Rams, Dallas Cowboys, Seattle Seahawks, Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints and Carolina Panthers — do not win 10 or more total games this season, and some tiebreaker procedures could come into play.

The Packers, oddly, do have favorable tiebreaker circumstances.

In that scenario, the Lions would lose to the Packers because they are on the remaining schedule and the Panthers would lose a tiebreaker if they only won one of their other two remaining games. They would hold a divisional record tiebreaker over the Vikings if the Vikings lost all of the remaining games on their schedule.

If Dallas and Seattle are 10-win teams, the Packers would hold head-to-head tiebreakers over them as well, but do not hold any tiebreakers over the Falcons or Saints.

That’s a difficult task, however. Rodgers has not been his spectacular self against Mike Zimmer defenses in the past.

The Packers with Rodgers also have a losing record against Zimmer teams, winning only 44 percent of their matchups. It should come as no surprise that since Zimmer started coaching for the Vikings, no team has sacked or intercepted Rodgers more.

While his passer rating against the Vikings isn’t bad — it would rank 14th among all quarterbacks this season — sacks hurt him a lot. His adjusted net yards per attempt, a statistic that takes into account sacks, would only rank 20th among quarterbacks, next to Andy Dalton and Josh McCown.

For a team giving up the second-most points per drive this season, that may not be good enough.

Green Bay fans are rightly happy that Rodgers is back, but that likely won’t mean a playoff berth. Football Outsiders has already calculated playoff odds for the Packers after accounting for how much Rodgers helps their team and still only peg them as having a 15 percent chance of making it to the postseason.

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Arif Hasan

Arif Hasan has written for sites all across the internet and his work has been featured in the Athletic, Pro Football Network, Star Tribune, LA Times, Forbes, SB Nation, the Bleacher Report and MSNBC. He currently also writes for the Wide Left Substack. You can find him on twitter at @ArifHasanNFL.

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