Season reaches inflection point vs. Giants
GREEN BAY – The Packers aren’t sitting where they were two weeks ago, which more than anything prompted the following comment from Xavier McKinney.
Asked earlier in the week if Sunday’s road matchup with the Giants is a “must-win,” the All-Pro safety replied, “Yeah, I think so. I think it’s a must-win. I think we’ve put ourselves kind of in a sticky situation.”
It’s easy to see where he’s coming from after two straight home losses have undone a portion of Green Bay’s strong 5-1-1 start. And while the season is by no means on the line in mid-November with five tallies in the win column, everyone knows the real meat of the schedule is coming up after the Giants game.
The Packers, who started the season with a win over the defending NFC North champion Lions but haven’t played a division opponent since, have five division contests over their final seven regular-season games. Plus the other two are against AFC contenders Denver and Baltimore.
So the prospect of entering that stretch run looks a lot more appealing with a 6-3-1 record as opposed to 5-4-1. That’s what’s hinging on Sunday’s game.
More directly as it relates to the NFC North, the Lions and Bears both got their sixth wins of the season last week, and the Packers have blown two tries to hit that number. After falling from first to third place in the division, they now have to simply keep pace.
“There’s a lot of football in front of us,” Head Coach Matt LaFleur said. “The bottom line is we gotta find a way to win a game.”
Feeling the same way but in more dire straits at 2-8, the Giants have changed course with Mike Kafka taking over as interim coach for the fired Brian Daboll. Kafka immediately announced, with rookie QB sensation Jaxson Dart in concussion protocol, that Jameis Winston would be elevated on the depth chart over Russell Wilson to start Sunday’s game.
While the Packers are more focused on the internal than the external, they aren’t ignoring the potential impact of those moves.
Running back Josh Jacobs knows all about what a midseason coaching shakeup can do, as during his time with the Raiders, Rich Bisaccia stepped in amidst the turmoil surrounding Jon Gruden’s dismissal in 2021 and sparked the team to a four-game winning streak to end the regular season and earn a playoff berth.
“The impact, it’s almost like wherever you (were) at before that point doesn’t matter,” Jacobs said. “It’s like a new fresh air. You want to go hard for that coach and also for your team. You want to finish the right way.
“So it’s something that I know not to take lightly, playing against a team like that, it kind of almost rejuvenizes the team.”
Regarding Winston, whom Micah Parsons called “a contagious, cultural dude,” he’s a free-spirited gunslinger who threw 33 TD passes and 30 INTs in his 5,000-yard passing season for the Buccaneers in 2019. The Packers simply must be ready for anything. As recently as last year when Winston started seven games for Cleveland, he threw 12 TDs and 13 INTs.
“He plays fearless,” LaFleur said. “He’s going to let it rip, and I would say more than anything, he’s a big-time energy guy.”
Winston will give both receivers and defenders chances to make plays with his style. Short on takeaways earlier in the season, Green Bay has secured one in four straight games now, so that streak needs to continue if not be enhanced.
But the Packers aren’t taking anything for granted.
“He’ll give opps for sure, but at the same time, like he could make plays as well,” McKinney said. “So I can’t just sit up here and say that he’s just gonna go out there and throw 10 picks because he not.
“We can’t go out there thinking that the game is just gonna be given to us ’cause it’s not, so we gotta go out there and earn it.”
Which brings the focus back to the internal, where the Packers’ defense is playing some of its best football while the offense is in a two-week scoring funk.
The mantra of the week has been no panic, and the offense is closer to finding success again than recent scoreboards would suggest. There is a clear sense of urgency, though, knowing two very winnable home games got away the last two weeks in down-to-the-wire losses.
“It’s really just about us this week,” Jacobs said. “That’s the main thing I’ve been trying to preach to the guys that we’re going to go as far as we want to go. So it’s really about us.
“Just because of the potential. I see the greatness in this team and this offense, and I don’t want it to go to waste.”
They don’t want the strong defensive efforts to continue going for naught, either, as all three of the Packers’ losses this season have come when the defense has allowed 16 or fewer points.
But any speculation about a rift between the two sides of the ball has been directly quashed by this team’s leaders. Once again, McKinney delivered the message:
“We don’t go through OTAs and we don’t do all the running and all the lifting and everything we do inside the building and even outside the building, we don’t do all that stuff for no reason,” he said. “We do that to build with each other. We do that so when we do have hard moments that we face and the adversities that we face, we’re able to come closer.
“Each man in this locker room, we’ve built a great relationship with each other to know that even through tough times and knowing that the season will never be easy – this league is not easy – that we can stick together and overcome any obstacle that we may be faced with.
“These times are really when you should come together even more. I know it may not be seen now but as time goes on, I think it’ll show.”
