The Packers Sandlot: Hate

Showing posts with label Hate. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Hate Wendesday: The St. Louis Rams

We all LOVE the Packers: “Hate Wednesday” is a continuing series wherein I expound upon my deep-seated hatred of other NFL football teams. I’m a Packer fan and Packer fans have long memories. Sometime it’s very simple and sometimes it’s complex. You may have other reasons to hate these teams. These are mine…

The Rams are one of the oldest franchises in the NFL. Be they residing in Cleveland, L.A. or St. Louis, the Rams and Packers have played each other 90 times, the first being in 1937. Indeed, from ’37 until 1971 the two teams squared off yearly with the exception of 1943. So that is an awful lot of water under the bridge and many, many opportunities for the two teams to develop a mutual loathing. Mine comes in a more recent contest: In 2001, the Packers and Rams would meet in the post-season for only the second time in their storied history. The 1967 contest would result in a Packer victory and propel them to that fateful championship game against the Cowboys: the famous “Ice Bowl.” But the 2001 contest would not end so gloriously. The Packers, powered by the passing of Brett Favre, had posted one of their best seasons ever but had ended up a Wild Card team behind the 13-3 Bears. Facing the so-called “Greatest Show on Turf” the Packers knew they would have to match the Kurt Warner-led Rams score-for-score and play flawless football. But the performance would not exactly be called “flawless”. The Packers committed eight turnovers and Favre would match a post-season record by throwing six interceptions, three of which would be returned for touchdowns. One bright spot for the Packers, a 95-yard kick return for a touchdown, would be nullified by a penalty. Despite these gifts, the Packers would actually play decent defense, holding the Rams to their fewest first down total in three years. But this self-inflicted beat down, the worst packer post-season loss ever, is more than enough for me to HATE the Rams!

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Hate Wednesday: The Arizona Cardinals

My reason to hate the Cards is a very simple one: Wild Card game, January 10^th 2010. The Packers had just finished beating Arizona the week before to get into that game. Yes, the Cardinals were playing very vanilla as they had already secured their own playoff spot but many in Packerland felt the emergence of a dominating Green Bay defense would more than contain anything Kurt Warner could throw at them. Boy, were we all wrong! Two turnovers on the first three Packer plays of the day were quickly translated into 14 Arizona points and the race was on! Warner completed what seemed like thousands of passes to anybody in a Cardinal jersey, building up a 31-10 lead. But this game was also the national coming-out party for one Mr. Aaron Rodgers who responded to all the Arizona offensive fireworks with some explosions of his own, scoring TD’s on five straight possessions in the second half to tie the game. But in overtime, things would go wrong quickly. On the first Packer play, Rodgers would overthrow a wide open Greg Jennings who had a step on the defense, a play that would have ended the game. Two plays later, facing a third-and-6 situation, Rodgers was sacked, fumbled the ball into the arms of Karlos Dansby, who raced it in for the winning score. What made this sudden, crushing defeat even more unbearable was that replays showed that Rodgers had been the victim of a facemask just prior to the sack. The NFL would later state that the contact was “incidental” and “had no effect on the outcome of the play”. This was a complete joke since all the replays showed Rodgers’ helmet pulled down over his eyes due to the infraction. Since even a fingernail laid anywhere near a QB’s head tends to draw a flag, this lame denial is the equivalent of the NFL admitting they goofed. The penalty would have given the Packers a first down, instead of a long plane ride home. We’ll never know what might have happened had the play been called correctly, but its reason enough to HATE the Cardinals!

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Hate Wednesday: The San Francisco Forty-Niners

For the entire tenure of Joe Montana and much that of his successor Steve Young, the Niners were the team to beat, not only in the NFC but in the NFL as a whole. As the Packers were struggling to keep from falling into complete irrelevance in the 80’s, San Francisco seemed to be in a football class unto themselves. Guided by the late, great Bill Walsh (NFL pappy and grand-pappy to so many coaches you’d have a hard time listing them but this Wikipedia graphic does it justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Walsh_Coaching_Tree3.png), SF was the birthplace of his experiment called the West Coast Offense that continues to dominate the NFL like his teams did thirty years ago. When the Packers played the Niners, there was no real question of how that game would end, just how bad the beating would be. Walsh’s legacy even allowed his team to continue their dominating ways into the 90’s, long after his retirement following the 1988 season. Except for one memorable game in 1989, the Packers would always struggle against San Francisco in the 80’s and early 90’s until they would run the table over them in the playoffs from 1995-1997. The humiliation of a loss in 1998 on Mike Holmgren’s last game as a Packer coach (in a game that almost single-handedly created the push for the booth review system we now have, thanks to a Jerry Rice fumble on the winning drive that was botched by the refs) was another painful blow but the memory of almost fifteen years of futility is reason enough to HATE the Forty-Niners.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Hate Wednesday: The Seattle Seahawks

Seattle Seahawks: Any Packer fan with a lick of history will know that the Golden Age – Act II began when Ron Wolf reached out and plucked Mike Holmgren out of the Forty-Niner staff and made him head coach of the Green Bay Packers. Then came Favre and Reggie and the rest is history. Coach Holmgren had a system and he had great players and he melded them into an NFL powerhouse, much like Vince Lombardi had done three decades earlier. And the results – a dominating team that appeared in two Super Bowls and won one – were undeniable. But that wasn’t enough for Mike Holmgren! He not only wanted to be the coach of the #1 team in the NFL, he wanted to be the general manager as well. Since the Packers already had a stellar GM in Ron Wolf, Green Bay suddenly became a dead-end job. Along came the Seattle Seahawks and made Holmgren the offer he couldn’t refuse: Head coach, general manager, in charge of the whole shootin’ match. Some say that in the final Packer game of his tenure, a playoff loss to San Francisco, Holmgren was merely going through the motions, knowing that the Seattle job was his for the taking. Who knows where the Packers might have gone if Holmgren had been content and Seattle had not been so enticing? We were subsequently saddled with the inept Ray Rhodes and then Mike Sherman who, ironically, would become Packer coach/GM and we all know how that ended. It wasn’t all Seattle’s fault (I put a lot of the blame right on Holmgren) but it’s reason enough to HATE the Seahawks.