Gary Seymour, sports@wolfrivermedia.com
The Green Bay Packers are exactly where they wanted to be at this stage of the National Football League season, which is to say hundreds of miles north of Florida.
Their 27-23 win in Jacksonville last Sunday marked the second straight season that the Packers started 1-0, after three consecutive years of opening-day losses.
Sunday night’s showdown with defending NFC North champion Minnesota is at hand, and barring any solar flares over the next few days, the winner will be determined in a much more playable climate than last week’s cookout.
When it was determined that the rotating schedules of divisional opponents this year would pit the NFC North with the AFC South, the lesser lights of the scheduling committee decided that it would be a good idea for the teams from the north to travel south for the early-September openers.
So in addition to the Packers in the Jacksonville sauna, you had Chicago broiling in Houston, Detroit simmering at Indianapolis and Minnesota baking in Tennessee, to better create the furnace effect so conducive to 60 minutes of football.
Temperatures on the field in Jacksonville’s EverBank Stadium exceeded 110 degrees – a lurking Heatstroke City for the guys wearing 20 pounds of gear, and a condition that might have contributed to some of the weirdness unleashed by the Packers’ offense.
Although they played well enough when it counted, their overall performance wasn’t one that you necessarily want to see repeated. There were too many instances where you could’ve sworn the plays were being diagrammed on the ground in the huddle.
There was the delay of game penalty to start the second half, which was bad enough until the Packers committed another delay of game penalty in the fourth quarter after already having called a timeout.
By the time they failed to score on third-and-goal from the Jacksonville 2-yard line, it only made sense that the reason was that half of the offensive line was pass protecting and the other half was run blocking.
“Half the guys thought it was a run, and I was one of them,” Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers said. “That’s why I handed the ball off. The other half was doing a pass. You’re not going to win a lot of games like that.”
Probably not, no.
There were enough encouraging plays to stay positive, though, like Davante Adams’ diving catch in the end zone to close out the first half, and cornerbacks Quinten Rollins and Damarious Randall coming up big in the last minute to preserve the win. Running back Eddie Lacy broke a couple of nice gains – one on a run and one on a run after catch – and wide receiver Jordy Nelson caught a TD pass in his first game back since the 2014 season.
As for the game coming up, the Packers figure to have their hands full despite the Vikings’ being without their injured No. 1 quarterback, Teddy Bridgewater.
Minnesota coach Mike Zimmer has been effective in neutralizing Rodgers’ impact, dating back to Zimmer’s days as defensive coordinator at Cincinnati. Rodgers and the O-line must solve the continual riddle of whom among the Vikings’ seven-man fronts Zimmer will be bringing.
The Vikes’ coach also left an element of guessing for which quarterback the Packers would have to prepare. Minnesota won its opener behind Shaun Hill, who played in three games last year as Bridgewater’s backup, but acquired Sam Bradford from Philadelphia after the injury to Bridgewater.
Bradford was the No. 1 overall pick of the 2010 draft (by the Rams), so it’s likely he’ll be tasked with leading Minnesota’s offense to its first touchdown over the last nine and a half quarters – the last one coming in last year’s regular-season finale. Their opponent that day was the Packers, whose job Sunday night is to keep the Vikings’ offense on ice.