so many 'experts' out there have the Pack ranked in the upper echelon of the top 10 expected contenders this upcoming season. and while i am certainly excited about this young team developing itself with a QB who may very well go down in history as greater than his predecessor (no, this isn't post-Minnesota-bias, i really think he has greater potential. whether or not he reaches it, or becomes as entertaining as...that...other guy...will remain to be seen) with a great set of reliable weapons (especially in Jennings and Finley, as they have not even begun to shed their treads) and a newly emerging aggressive defense (which is for the first time in my lifetime ((barring the horribly sadistic sense of elation as Chuck Cecil nearly decapitated opponents)) as fun to watch as our offense...

...i'm just not convinced we're really there yet. we nearly flubbed every game last season, against terribly pathetic teams. and against mediocre to good teams we either lost or won by small margins. oh...and do i need to mention Tampa? sure, sure...say what you will about the o-line, the motivation, the blahblahblah...when all is said and done, that loss to Arizona was sloppy and embarrassing. our defense might as well have been playing a practical joke on all of us.

so yeah. we beat a bunch of crappy teams while playing kinda crappy. we did pretty good and still lost against some better teams. and ultimately, we just didn't look THAT good. not Top 5 good, imo. the only really impressive game of last year, as i review these highlights, was against the Boys. that was a game. and there were some good fights. but i'm just not convinced that unless we get our shit together...against teams who aren't already busy embarrassing themselves, we might have a different perspective.

am i alone here?

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Yes.

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We had a plus 164 over our opponents last season. That's an average of 10 points more per game.

I'm not saying we're an elite team, although to say we nearly flubbed every game last season is preposterous and shows lack of responsible research before making such crude statements.

Edit, eight ouf our wins were 10 points or more. We had five games against teams that won their division, losing 3 of them. (Cardinals and Cowboys were the two wins) The loss against the Buccaneers makes us crap? Do you know that the Saints also lost to the Bucs?

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You're definitely in the minority in your thinking. And quite honestly, you should be.

We beat a bunch of crappy teams you say? Um, yeah what do you expect good teams to when facing teams not as good as them? Beat them. The Rams, we beat 36-17. The Lions we beat 26-0 the first time, 34-12 the second time. We beat the Browns 31-3. We also beat the Seahawks 48-10. Heck, we were even leading the Bucs 28-17 in the fourth Q before the wheels fell off. If you focus on just our offense and defense (take away ST touchdown we gave up via blocked Punt) then we outscored them 28-10 in more than three quarters. You expect teams at the top to dominate teams at the bottom. We did. Honestly, we even beat up on a play-off team in week 17 playing their back-ups; you expect good teams to take care of business against lesser teams.

I'm not sure what "top 5 good" looks like from your view; we beat 7 of our last 8 opponents and showed our team can handle and respond to adversity. We beat Baltimore, the Bears @ Chicago, and then gave the Steelers all they could handle and lost a heart-breaker @ Pitt. Doing that shows our team was no joke - those are some tough games to win especially for a team like ours that hadn't exactly built a reputation on being tough.

We played the Bengals tough. We played Minny tough both times. We played a Steelers team in do-or-die playoff mode tough. It's not like we were blown out by playoff caliber teams.

As Z2C mentioned, our defense made plays. Say what you want about covering, but there were times when we needed the D to make a play, they did and got a turnover. Yes our defense can improve, but they did a lot of good this season; they showed progress.

Again, when you say "we didn't look that good" I can't agree with you. We looked pretty darn good against lesser competition, and frankly for D in their first year of a scheme and an offense that featured the worst Tackle in the league in Barbre and had its star QB injured pretty seriously at times, we looked more than fine.

This is a team that has 22 starting players that are quite solid. Add to that a year older depth chart and some influx of talent at positions desperately needing quality young depth (OL / DL) then you have to like the chances of this team. Are there problems to overcome? Yeah, especially with our pass D. But all good teams have something or another they need to fix.

Frankly, we were a pretty darn good team last year despite our bad Special Teams. As another poster said in another thread, with an Offense and Defence in the top-5, if our Special Teams ever become even average, we could be scary good.

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In the next 5 years, this offense is going to be FREAKY good. Thing is, a team is only as strong as it's weakest link. Every year we go into the season paper thin at at least one position. This year it looks like it could be CB, possibly OLB.

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The two losses to the Vikings were the most disappointing games to me, other than, obviously, the playoff loss. Although the Packers were competitive against the Vikings, they got beaten to the punch and had to play from behind in both games. Not to mention that their former QB beat them like a rented donkey. I'm looking for some improvement against the Vikings this year, and at least one win. But overall, I think there is good reason to expect this Packers team to be a contender.

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eheheh. i knew i'd stirred some shit up with that post. for the record, that was a very, very, very drunken post. i'm sticking with my statement, though. we looked great against horrible teams in the first half of most of our games and then usually proceeded to have meltdowns in the second half and make stupid mistakes and just kind of hang on to our lead.

the Vikings, Bengals, Steelers, Cowboys, Ravens and Cardinals. those were the games i really judge us by since those are the best teams we played...and the only teams with decent records. and against them we...in MY opinion...didn't look like a top 5 team.

i know we'll be better this season, i just get a little worried when i see our name that high up on these lists. i don't want to get too excited. i guess i'm cautiously optimistic.

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This is going of logic or anything like that, but i sort of prefer when we go into the season as underdogs, seeing people tagging the packers as the team to go to the superbowl worries me a bit, cause these idiots have NO IDEA what they are talking about.

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We are 2 things away from being an elite team:
1) pass protection,
2) pass rush

Sure you can say that our DBs have weaknesses, but Woody and Collins are both elite with Woody being borderline Hall of Fame.

A better pass rush would hide our pass protection problems.

Now, #1 has been addressed in the offseason. Cliffy and Tausch are both back, we got Buluga backing them both up, and some young talent with another year experience backing up Buluga. The middle of our OL is good. So I'm not worried about #1. Plus, Aaron knows now that he's got to get rid of the ball sooner. That came with time and Aaron is a year older and a year wiser.

#2 - this is the wild card. This could go either way. Capers claims that all we needed was one more year in the system. If he is right, then #2 is fixed.

Thus, if both #1 & #2 are addressed, we are an elite team.

RaiderPride said '09 was our year to win the SB. He may have jumped the gun by one year. The Saints won the SB last year with a mediocre D (bottom half in Points Allowed). The year prior, the Steelers won the SB with a mediocre O (bottom half in Points Scored). Two years back, the Giants won the SB with a mediocre set of DBs but a nasty pass rush.

There hasn't been a dominant team to win the SB since the '04 Patriots, who were elite on both sides on the ball. So as Tupac used to say "Baby, keep your head up." As a Packer fan, you got as much a shot as anyone to win it all.

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I hear where you're coming from, but I don't worry about it. Think about 1996. The Packers were the chic pick to win the Super Bowl that season, and then they went right out and did it. Looking back on it, it seems almost predestined now, but it was not that way at the time.

So if people are picking the Packers to do well, I'm going to enjoy it, as long as it's justified. That's part of the fun of being a fan.

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