The Green Bay Packers just suffered one of the most devastating playoff losses in the history of… the NFL.
Probably the only people who can identify with them right now are guys who played on the 1992 Houston Oilers. Those clowns authored the biggest playoff collapse in NFL history. They held a 35-3 lead in the third quarter of their wild card game with the Buffalo Bills and ended up blowing that 32-point lead and losing 41-38 in overtime.
How did they respond from that crushing defeat? They got better the following season.
Houston improved from 10-6 in 1992 to 12-4 in 1993 and won the AFC Central. Of course, they would lose in the divisional round of the playoffs that year, but the important thing here is they recovered instead of going into the crapper.
Where will the 2015 Green Bay Packers go?
Two recent season-ending losses could tell us.
Chitko keeps pointing this one out to me. The last time the Packers suffered a playoff loss in overtime, such as they did last Sunday, was in a wild card game against Arizona following the 2009 season. That game was pretty heartbreaking as well, with the Cardinals getting a 51-45 win after Karlos Dansby returned an Aaron Rodgers’ fumble for the final score.
The refs managed to ignore another Cardinal defender blatantly grabbing Rodgers’ facemask on the play, but that’s beside the point now.
The important thing is, the Packers rebounded from that to win it all in 2010.
Of course, I keep pointing this one out to Chitko. The last time the Packers lost the NFC Championship game was following the 2007 season. That game was also an overtime defeat, but unlike the other two games we’re discussing, it happened in Green Bay. As you’ll surely recall, the game turned on a Brett Favre interception, which allowed the New York Giants to kick the game-winning field goal a short time later and pull out a 23-20 win.
The 2008 Green Bay Packers would go 6-10.
Obviously, that was far from a typical season, however. Rodgers was in his first year as the starter and although he played just fine, the transition was anything but smooth. The Packers were pretty much grounded when Favre decided he was more important than the team and brought the circus to town in August.
Still, that team had plenty of talent — Greg Jennings, Donald Driver, Ryan Grant, Aaron Kampman, Al Harris, Nick Collins and Charles Woodson to name a few. Those last two guys were second-team All Pros.
And six wins is all they could muster the season after they lost in the NFC Championship game.
Obviously, each team is constructed differently. The 2015 Packers aren’t just going to fall into one of these categories — Super Bowl champs or 6-10 failure.
They certainly aren’t going to be the same unit they were this season, either. We’ll look more at what’s going to change from a personnel standpoint in the days ahead.