GREEN BAY — Bristling for the second consecutive day at repeated questions about his team's second-half defensive collapse against the Atlanta Falcons, you almost got the feeling that Mike McCarthy just wanted to scream We won the game! at those in the Lambeau Field media auditorium on Wednesday.
The Green Bay Packers coach held back, but he did acknowledge that there are lessons to be learned from what happened in the team's 43-37 victory, which began with a 31-7 halftime lead.
"I thought we started the game just the you'd like. I think anytime you come off of a big win, you concern yourself with a potential letdown. I thought the preparation really showed up in the beginning of the game," McCarthy said Wednesday, as the team turned its attention to Sunday's game at Buffalo. "We didn't sustain it the second half. We've had a chance to look at it and learn from it. And we'll apply it to the future."
Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, speaking on his weekly radio show on 540 ESPN and ESPNWisconsin.com on Tuesday, posited that there were a few factors that conspired to get the Falcons back into the game — starting with Julio Jones' 79-yard catch on the opening play of the third quarter, which set up a quick touchdown.
"We've had some big leads at half — [such as] 31-0, 42-0 — so we've had some leads where they weren't coming back. This was 31-7," Rodgers explained. "It's like in basketball. My old coach used to say, '[There's] one stat you can probably tell how the game went, and that was often the score differential in the first half of the third quarter. Because a lot of times, after you make the adjustments at halftime, the team that starts fast in the third quarter is the one that gets momentum back and actually can carry that throughout the game. And that actually plays out in the NFL as well.
"We've had a number of games where we've doubled up and score at the end of the first half and the beginning of the second half. I remember a specific game in 2010 against Minnesota where we scored at the end of the first half to go up 17-3 and then we scored the first drive of the second half and it's 24-3, the next thing you know it's a three-score game. Against Atlanta in the playoffs, we scored at the end of the first half to go up 21-14, Tramon [Williams] then picks off a pass and goes back for a touchdown and it's 28-14, [and then] we score on the first possession of the third quarter, and it goes from a one-score game or a tie game to a three-score game. That's when you can really break a team's will.
"[On Monday night], they actually came out and they had the big 80-yard play, and the next thing you know, they're down 17, it's three scores, you got 28 minutes on the clock, and they've got to be feeling, 'We're back in this game, we just need a couple of stops.' And that's kind of where the game tightened, and you could feel it tighten a little bit there."
It was clear Wednesday that the most irritating thing about how the defense played in the second half for McCarthy was the poor communication between the players on the field and the coaches on the sideline. McCarthy had to burn two second-half timeouts when the defense couldn't align properly.
"We don't evaluate the game based on the final score, we don't evaluate the game based on what our statistics are. There's always things to learn from," McCarthy said. "[But] at the end of the day, good teams find ways to win and the offense pick up for the defense."
Jason Wilde wrote: