This is a thread for celebration, smack talk, predictions, and sighs of relief for the fans of lesser playoff teams. Only fans of teams going to the playoffs, officially. Haven’t clinched? Sorry.
49ers and Packers, welcome to the post-season!
It’s been a really fun season for 49ers fans. We had it so good in the past, but the last decade has been a disheartening stretch not just of not-good teams, but of laughing-stock/irrelevant teams. To be so suddenly dominant is really fun.
I can imagine Packers fans are feeling good, too. We seem to be on a collision course. (Bring it, chumps :D)
The Packers are winning with Aaron Rodgers*, the 49ers are winning with the stingiest defense I’ve seen in a decade. 15 touchdowns scored against them all year; 13.4 per game average. If any team can stop the Packers, it’s the 49ers.
The Packers defense isn’t all that good, but they sure do intercept a lot of those passes that teams are forced to throw to keep up. Will we see if the “defense wins championships” paradigm has changed?
*: thanks, Mike “Fucking” Nolan, great draft pick there.
Actually, I disagree with you. The 49ers are very much the wrong team to beat the Pack. The 49ers ARE good enough to reach the Super Bowl, but they have to hope someone else knocks off the Packers for them.
Nobody is going to shut down Aaron Rodgers. The teams that can beat the Packers are the ones that can score a lot of points in their own right. Luckily for the Packers, there aren’t many good quarterbacks in the NFC. But as we saw yesterday, even a mediocre offense like that of the Giants can score big against the Packers’ porous defense.
The team the Packers have to worry abut most is New Orleans, because on a good night, the Saints could beat Green Bay 42-38. But even a great defense is going to give up at least 24 points to the Packers. And Alex Smith can’t and won’t get the 49ers enough points to make a game of it.
Now, assuming the Packers reach the Super Bowl, there are several AFC teams that can score a lot of points against them. Tom Brady or Ben Roethlisberger, among others, COULD definitely put up big numbers and top the Pack in a high scoring game.
Rules, schmules – I’m posting the way this is going down.
Nope, sorry, they won’t get a chance to meet. This is going to be a mirror of the 2007 season in which the Giants (who have four extremely winnable games in front of them) catch fire at the end. They’ll face a random wild card team in the first round, and then spend the next two rounds knocking off heavily-favored teams to whom they lost in the regular season. The only difference will be they’ll be ending a 17-0 run instead of an 18-0 one.
