The Green Bay Packers clinched a playoff berth in Week 16, beating the New Orleans Saints on Monday Night Football. Since then, things have gone south quickly for the team, with consecutive losses to the Minnesota Vikings and Chicago Bears.
They lost the sixth seed, finishing the regular season with a concerning 1-5 division record despite a solid 11-6 overall record. Now, a big task is to keep the motivation and confidence in spite of the negative vibes around the team.
The mindset is clear. Inside the locker room, the mantra is that the postseason is a new season. What happened in the regular season does not matter.
“It’s 0-0. We’ve gotta do things that we feel we’ve had success with, and lean into that,” head coach Matt LaFleur said. “We know it’s gonna be a great challenge, Philly is a helluva team. They do it in every phase of the game. Offensively, defensively, and on special teams. It’s not an easy environment to play, but we had a helluva game with them in Week 1. Unfortunately we were on the wrong side of that, but we’ve just gotta get back to the drawing board, approach the week, flush this game as quickly as possible, and move on.”
Could the Packers have done better in these last two games? Absolutely. At the end of the day, though, what will define their 2024 season is what happens next.
“We’re going to the playoffs, we gotta flush the season and have a clean slate. As we know, anything can happen in the playoffs, it’s win or go home,” quarterback Jordan Love said. “There are a lot of things we’ve gotta clean up and be better at, but it’s the same message. Obviously we’re not getting in with momentum, but who cares? We’ve gotta go ahead and attack this week. We’re playing some good teams here in the playoffs, but we gotta find a way to go win
The Packers open the week as underdogs against the Eagles. But what they did in 2023 is the best example. Since the inception of the 14-team playoff by the NFL, Green Bay is the only seventh seed to win a postseason game. They have to make it happen again, but they don’t think it’s nearly close to an impossible task
“This is like March Madness from here on out, anything can happen and you gotta be sharp, you gotta be detailed,” LaFleur stressed. “I don’t think anybody has to do anything out of the ordinary, any superhuman effort. It’s just guys gotta be dialed in, doing their responsibilities. We always talk about doing your 1/11th, and it’s so true in these playoff games. The margins are thin enough in this league, each week it can go either way.”
Repeating the seventh seed wasn’t the ideal outcome for the Packers in 2024. But repeating what they did in the wild card round last season is a great way to overcome the issues they’ve had
