Some British musician once wrote, “The long and winding road/That leads to your door/Will never disappear/I’ve seen that road before/It always leads me here.”
Sure, Paul, but what do you know about football?
Maybe more than we think, because Mr. McCartney’s song sure seems to apply to the Green Bay Packers and the upcoming showdown with their rivals across the river, the Minnesota Vikings. It’s been an absolutely bizarre season for both teams, enough to make you think you might have accidentally swapped your coffee mug for Aaron Rodgers’ ayahuasca cup (which would also explain all the vomiting Packers fans were doing during the first half of the season). At that emetic midpoint of the schedule, the teams appeared to be on perfectly opposite trajectories, with the potentially resurgent Vikings climbing toward the top of the NFC standings while Green Bay sank so fast the churchbells started chiming in Superior and another songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot, began writing a sequel to “Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald.”
And yet, after all the sturm and drang (you can’t have drang without your sturm), after all the tumult and turmoil, the wild comebacks and the baffling missed calls and the improbable bounces and the sulky press conferences, it’s all come back to right where we started. The stakes of the Week 17 grudge match aren’t exactly what we expected, but the teams are.
It’s easy to forget that, way back in the halcyon days of late August 2022, the mild queasiness over the potential shortcomings of this Packers squad were background noise to a lot of talk about Super Bowl windows and legacies and back-to-back MVP trophies. “Matt LaFleur has never lost back-to-back games, etc.” The Vikings, meanwhile, were upstarts with an unknown ceiling and an X-factor of a head coach whose play-calling record was one of mystery, not mastery.
The delightful Will Ragatz compiled this handy list of predictions for that Week 1 game, which is worth looking back at ahead of the rematch. Ragatz himself had the Vikings narrowly riding their home-field advantage to a squeaker of a victory, as did Gregg “60% G” Rosenthal, Mike Florio, Eric Moody of ESPN, and the Sporting News. However, the majority of the Sports Illustrated and Bleacher Report staff, plus PFT, CBS’s Pete Priscoe, and even the hometown Minneapolis Star-Tribune had the Vikings losing, some by a fairly significant margin.
Nobody predicted the Pack getting thumped the way they did, which turned out to be a bad omen for a team that would get so lost in the woods you’d think they were trying to drive to a casino near the UP. That fab British singer — you know, the songwriter for Wings, Linda’s husband — described that stretch of the season too. “The wild and rainy night/The rain that washed away/Has left a pool of tears/Crying for the day.”
That’s the soundtrack to a five-game losing streak, alright.
Now that Green Bay has righted their foundering ship, though, everything the analysts were saying about the Packers’ potential at the beginning of the season is ringing true.
The Packers should finally have both a healthy offensive line and their ideal configuration of the defensive line figured out. Well, now they mostly do, as explained by Zone Coverage’s own Wendell Ferriera, even if both Elgton Jenkins and David Bakhtiari are questionable yet again. High-profile coordinator Rich Bisaccia should whip this special teams unit into shape. Okay, turns out getting rid of Amari Rodgers, plus the emergence of secret kick-return master Keisean Nixon, renders this actually true. It may take a little time for Aaron Rodgers to develop chemistry with his rookie receivers, but when he does, they could be dangerous. And, right on schedule, they are.
Injuries, particularly to Nixon and Christian Watson, could be significant stumbling blocks. But, overall, the Packers are finally the Packers fans expected. The Vikings remain formidable but, despite their division-winning record, Vegas odds have them as respectable but definitive underdogs headed into Lambeau.
Stripped of context, isolated to this week, this one game is setting up pretty much exactly as most fans and experts would have projected at the end of the pre-season, even though that same outcome might have sounded absurd in Week 9. That long, winding road of the season has led us right back to where we expected to be.
