Green Bay Packers

How Did the Packers Reel Off Five Straight After Starting 0-1?

Photo credit: Kareem Elgazzar (The Enquirer via USA TODAY)

As Aaron Rodgers scooted into the Soldier Field end zone from six yards out late in the fourth quarter on Sunday, he not only sealed a 24-14 win for the Green Bay Packers and his ownership of the Chicago Bears. He punctuated what is now a five-game winning streak on the heels of a 38-3 loss to the New Orleans Saints in Week 1.

Looking back on the aftermath of that season-opening loss highlights the confidence that the Packers had coming out of it and how wrong many fans (myself included) were about the direction of this team.

In the moments following the debacle against New Orleans, Matt LaFleur mixed in some cliché coachspeak — “We need to take a long, hard look in the mirror” — with genuine frustration that the Packers didn’t come out and perform the way that he believed that they were capable of. To LaFleur’s credit, he pointed the finger at himself first. “It was an all-around poor performance,” he said, “and that starts with myself.” But he took solace in the fact that Green Bay would be able to lace ’em up 16 more times to try to atone for the initial loss.

Rodgers was a bit more even-keeled, refusing to give too much oxygen to the dumpster fire that played out at the Superdome. He admitted that he played poorly but refused to double down on any negativity, reiterating that it was indeed only one game.

There’s no denying that the Packers were somewhere between terrible and atrocious against the Saints in Week 1. Still, it’s a testament to the team that they could seemingly put the performance behind themselves quickly, moving to a point where they have a two-game advantage in the NFC North standings after just six weeks of the season.

How did Green Bay get here, especially considering the mounting injuries? Obviously, the players deserve the lion’s share of the credit for going out and performing. But the work that Brian Gutekunst has done bringing in impact draft picks and veteran free agents can’t be overlooked. Most importantly, he patched up his relationship with Rodgers enough to allow the quarterback to captain this ship.

Harness energy, block bad.

If the Packers can take care of business in a very winnable game against the Washington Football Team this Sunday, they’ll be in a great position. A 6-1 record would match their start in 2019 and be a game better than they were at this juncture a season ago. Both of LaFleur’s first two seasons have resulted in a 13-3 regular-season record. While there are 17 games now, a similar record certainly seems attainable. Several road contests seem daunting — at the Arizona Cardinals, Kansas City Chiefs, and Baltimore Ravens — mixed in with never-easy games against the Seattle Seahawks and Los Angeles Rams. Toss in some NFC North battles still to come, and it’s not the easiest upcoming slate, making the wins they’ve already stacked up all the more critical.

Green Bay wasn’t healthy heading into Week 1, and things haven’t improved in that department since. Sure, David Bakhtiari might come back soon. Still, the Packers have taken the multiple-week losses of players like Elgton Jenkins, Josh Myers, Jaire Alexander, Marquez Valdes-Scantling, Za’Darius Smith, Kevin King, and a host of others in stride. If you’d have known after Week 1 that players of that caliber were going to miss as much time as they’d have, nobody would have anticipated that they’d find a way to rattle off five-straight wins. Yet, here we are.

With 11 games still to go, there’s an incredible amount still to be decided in the playoff picture. But we’re starting to learn who might be jockeying for position down the stretch. The Cardinals still have yet to lose, and three teams — the Dallas Cowboys, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Rams — sit at 5-1 with the Packers. That quintet of teams appears to be the class of the NFC right now. It might take 14 or 15 wins to be the lone team that gets a first-round bye, and the Packers would love to find themselves in that position once again, even if it didn’t end the way they’d have hoped against Tampa Bay a season ago.

Getting to that top seed means piling up wins any way you can get them. With a seemingly stacked group atop the conference, Green Bay won’t have too much of a margin for error through the last few months of the season. The best news for the Packers might be that they haven’t even gotten close to playing their best football yet. They’ve eeked out wins in remarkable fashion against the San Francisco 49ers and Cincinnati Bengals, and they will need to play better to beat some of the other contenders like Arizona or Los Angeles.

There are marked ways that Green Bay can still improve — defensive red zone efficiency, third-down conversions — and the hope is that the injury luck will tilt back in their favor following the carnage that has been the first month and a half of the season. The fact of the matter is, through all of it, the Packers are still bona fide contenders in the NFC. At least outwardly, Green Bay believed that was already the case after losing by five touchdowns in Week 1, and after five consecutive wins, they’ve shown the rest of us we should believe too.

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Photo credit: Kareem Elgazzar (The Enquirer via USA TODAY)

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