NFC North

It’s time to take a look at the All-NFC North team for 2011. As ever, we’e being a little creative with the formations to try and get the best possible players on the field and, in this instance, that leaves us with a truly destructive looking offense.

The “Black and Blue” division doesn’t let us down when it comes to defense either, with only safety being a notable weak point on a side stacked with stud players. No team in the division has fewer than five players selected to this team which shows that despite some teams struggling (well, the Vikings), there is talent all over, and no one team is in power all the way through.

So let’s take a look at the rundown. Read the rest of this entry »

Green Bay became the first 15-1 team in league history to go one-and-done in the playoffs when they fell to the red hot New York Giants at Lambeau Field on Sunday.  The Giants never trailed and ended the game going away from the Packers who only briefly threatened a comeback in a game they were unquestionably second best in.

Aaron Rodgers missed some uncharacteristic throws in the game and only his running kept the Packers from allowing the game to slip out of hand as their defense could never really derail the Giants.  Rodgers’ job was made even tougher by drops from Green Bay receivers, something they have struggled with all season, but which really cost them in this game, one in which they needed every play that was there for the making.

The Giants are now as hot as any team in the league and are riding a win streak that has some remarkable similarities to their Super Bowl run of 2007 (which also ran through Lambeau Field), and also to the close of Green Bay’s season last year.  The playoffs are all about getting hot at the right time, and right now the Giants are that team.  

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The defending Super Bowl Champion Green Bay Packers find their dream of an improbable repeat still very much alive, and may well be the best team left at this point. They will host the New York Giants in a game that will cast many minds back not to the first game between the two sides this season, but to an NFC Championship game back in 2007. That game in frigid Lambeau ended Brett Favre’s tenure with Green Bay on an ugly interception and thrust Aaron Rodgers on an unsuspecting NFL landscape.

Rodgers is now a Super Bowl MVP, and he will go head-to-head with another in the form of Eli Manning in this game. Manning has been quietly having a stellar season and unlike the quarterbacks everybody is talking about, is doing so behind some extremely suspect protection from an O-line badly in need of reconstruction. Read the rest of this entry »

Our Off-season Depth Chart Outlook series continues today with the NFC North division.

What I’m doing here is going team-by-team and taking a look at each team’s roster situation at the four key offensive Fantasy Football positions (QB RB WR TE). I’ll also be speculating on a few potential off-season moves we could see each of these teams make.

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The Detroit Lions will surely look back on this game with a mixture of frustration and disappointment as a mad five minutes in the fourth quarter saw them throw away their opportunity to hand the New Orleans Saints another Wild Card playoff upset. It was far from a surefire thing as their defense had hemorrhaged yards and points in the second half, but they were in the game and with Calvin Johnson firing on all cylinders once again, anything was possible. When the Saints picked up two touchdowns and a turnover in the space of just over two minutes, the game turned finally to the Saints. Missed opportunities were the key for this inexperienced Detroit team and they should come back next season hungry to better their first playoff game in more than a decade.

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For the second of these articles, what better way to complete the Saturday set of Wild Card games than by comparing and contrasting another defensive tackle going against an equally accomplished line. Ndamukong Suh hasn’t had the greatest of sophomore years, but here was an opportunity to live up to the hype by making plays against a Pro Bowl interior. The Lions may have come up short but how did Suh measure up?

This season the Lions coaching staff has deliberately cut down on Suh’s snaps. Presumably the plan here is to either allow him more energy later in the game, give other players a chance, extend his playing career, or more likely a combination of all three. In his rookie year he averaged 90% of all defensive snaps, but this year that has been reduced to 78%. Interestingly, that is very close to what he got in this game too (75%), playing almost all of those snaps at left defensive tackle. He was used on two occasions as a left defensive end, but not once on the right side.

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One team is coming off breaking all sorts of passing records, the other wondering just how they gave up six touchdowns and 480 yards to a backup quarterback. On the surface of things, this is a rematch of the Week 13 encounter that saw the New Orleans Saints hammer the Detroit Lions which doesn’t hold much appeal here. After all, the numbers suggest the Lions secondary are likely to be on the wrong end of a Drew Brees-inspired beatdown.

However, we’re in the postseason now, and you don’t need to tell the Saints about how the playoffs can play host to shocks and surprises. It was a year ago the no-hope Seahawks ended New Orleans’ dreams of repeating with a certain running back entering Beast Mode. So why can’t the Lions cause the upset? Why can’t Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson decimate the Saints secondary? Why can’t this be where Drew Brees has an off day?

Let’s look at what the Lions will need to do to shock the world, and what the Saints will have to do to stop them.

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So this is a game that the Packers didn’t care about; they’d simply rest their big names, run the ball at every opportunity, just take the loss and move on? Yeah right.

Matt Flynn is a free agent in February and he and the coaches had other ideas about giving up a 22 year home winning streak against the Lions. Instead they gave him the opportunity to shop his wares to all the NFL teams struggling at the QB position and condemn the Lions to the playoff gig no one wants; away to the offensive juggernaut of the New Orleans Saints. Matthew Stafford together with Calvin Johnson played about as well as you can but still came up short in a game that had plenty of interest for interested parties and neutral fans alike. Here’s what I thought of some of the key players:

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The final regular season week of the 2011 season saw the Chicago Bears travel to face the Minnesota Vikings in a divisional game that meant…nothing. This was precisely the kind of game the NFL had hoped to avoid by moving divisional games to the end of the season, and in truth, it worked in this game.

Two teams with nothing more than draft position to play for found themselves fighting tooth and nail for the win, and characteristically it was the mistakes, rather than the impressive play, that wound up being decisive. The Vikings were in danger of landing a torpedo into the side of their draft position until the final drive ended with a badly overthrown pass from Joe Webb, in for the injured Christian Ponder once more.

For Chicago the game seemed to center around thrusting Jared Allen towards Michael Strahan’s single-season sack record, and then doing everything humanly possible to prevent him getting one more to break it. In the end he fell just a half sack short of the record.

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An NFC North encounter to round off the season features both sides finding themselves with nothing to play for. The Bears were firmly in the thick of the playoff hunt until an injury cost them their star quarterback, Jay Cutler, and since that point the injuries have only been mounting, with Matt Forte the latest major piece to go down for the year. Minnesota on the other hand was never at the races this season and languish with a 3-12 record heading into their final game.

The Vikings took themselves out of the running for the number one overall pick in the next draft last week when they beat Washington, and a final win this week could drop them to as far as the sixth overall pick, which would be little short of a disaster for a team with so many holes to fill. Losing Adrian Peterson forces them to lean on the shoulders of Toby Gerhart as their main bellcow in the run game, and their rookie quarterback Christian Ponder returns to the starting lineup this week, after being sidelined with concussion. Chicago are playing for pride and little else, but that may well be enough. Here are three matchups that will heavily influence the outcome.

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