When Good Teams Go Bad: Can The Seahawks And Packers Save Their Seasons?

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The NFL sometimes feels like a scheduled, weekly exercise in reminding us all just how we don’t know anything. Detroit going into Green Bay and limiting Aaron Rodgers and the Packers to only 16 points? Seattle dropping a heartbreaker at home to the suddenly unstoppable Arizona Cardinals in primetime? The NFL can be a pretty hilarious place when you stop and pay attention, but the Packers and Seahawks don’t have time for laughs now. They met in the NFC Championship last year, but now they both need wins and they ain’t coming fast or easy.

Green Bay’s had a few weird games since its Week 7 bye. A 6-0 record before that and everything was looking like gold. Then a dismal performance by the offense (140 total yards) against Denver in Week 8 and a pretty shocking 29-10 defeat. Then a closely contested 37-29 loss at Carolina, which looks like it could knock off the ‘72 Dolphins if they showed up at Bank of America Stadium tomorrow. (I mean, they’d all be pretty old now, so it wouldn’t really be a fair match-up, but I digress.) And then last week’s bumbling loss to the Lions, which actually looked good in the aggregate — Rodgers had 333 yards and two TDs, and they never turned the ball over — but the offense stalled for much of the day. At one point, nine-consecutive drives ended with a punt. The Packers could only find their missing flow late in the fourth quarter, and then they still needed to knock through a 52-yard field goal to win, but Mason Crosby couldn’t deliver.

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Overall, the Packers shouldn’t stress too much. First off, they’re 6-3. The advanced analytics tell me that’s alright. Second, they’re still protecting the ball; their turnover differential (plus-7) is fourth-best in the NFL. And third, they’ve still got a top-10 defense, according to Football Outsiders’ Defensive DVOA rankings. Do they need the running game (208 yards combined the last three games) to come back to life? Yeah, that’d be nice. And wide receivers Randall Cobb and James Jones need to stay healthy because their depth is already thin with Jordy Nelson sidelined for the year. But losing all sense of reality and blaming Olivia Munn isn’t going to save this team; it’s going to require a return to fundamental Aaron Rodgers-style football.

If Green Bay holds on to the ball and lets the passing game keep the sticks moving downfield, it can stave off just about anyone, even a stiff divisional rival like the 7-2 Vikings on Sunday (4:25 p.m. EST, Fox). Teddy Bridgewater and Adrian Peterson went to the Black Hole last Sunday and showed a pretty solid Raiders team that they were for real. The Packers and Vikings play again in Week 17 in Green Bay, so a loss here would not necessarily portend any death knells in the backwoods of Wisconsin, but it would be a fourth-straight defeat and only serve to exacerbate the questions swirling around this team.

The Seahawks, on the other hand, have got some issues to work out. At 4-5, they just dropped a potentially devastating home game to Arizona and are very much on the outside looking in with regards to the NFC playoff picture. They’ve turned the ball over 11 times this season, which is still among the lowest rates in football, but it’s only three behind their total from the 2014 season. They rank 11th in offensive DVOA, which is okay, but they’re still behind teams like Buffalo and Kansas City. It’s really the first extended stretch of turbulence for quarterback Russell Wilson since he entered the league four years ago.

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It’s hard to remember, but head coach Pete Carroll had two-consecutive losing seasons before Wilson arrived. The biggest problem is that the Seahawks are giving up points at a very un-Seahawks rate. At this pace, Seattle will allow 318 points, which would be the most since Carroll’s first year in 2010. They had a negative-97 point differential (and still won the NFC West, which, wow). As of now, it’s plus-20. The Seahawks just don’t score enough points (20th in the NFL) to let opponents be this proficient with the ball.

So, here’s the good news: Seattle plays San Francisco this weekend (4:25 p.m. EST, Fox), and the Niners are terrible! They’re so bad, Blaine Freakin’ Gabbert is starting at QB for them. Let me be clear: The Niners are not a good football team in almost any respect. No one has scored fewer points or accumulated fewer yards of offense than San Francisco. And their defense is ranked 30th by Defensive DVOA. They’re so, so, so bad.

The Seahawks should be thanking the schedule makers they get the Niners at home at this point in their season, because they still have a puncher’s chance of grabbing a playoff spot. If you assume that Green Bay will eventually win the NFC North, then the three teams that will most likely be gunning for those two Wild Card spots are Atlanta, Minnesota, and Seattle.

The Falcons have not exactly impressed (they lost to the aforementioned awful Niners in their last game) and still have two games left against the powerful Panthers, but also play Minnesota in Week 12. The Vikings are on a five-game win streak, but have two games left against Green Bay and also play (who else?) Seattle in Week 13. If the Seahawks can take that match-up plus the three remaining games they most definitely should — vs. Niners, at Baltimore, and vs. Browns — that puts them at eight wins and then 9-7, and a playoff spot (with some help from tiebreakers) becomes eminently possible. Seattle has already saved its season once, so what’s one more time?

Of course, lose to the Niners and you might as well schedule those mid-January tee times right now.

Panic won’t get you very far in the NFL, but Green Bay and Seattle are teams on the precipice of lost seasons, so they need to stay focused and find a way back to the commanding styles of football that have worked for each. Even assuming that happens in both cases, I don’t suspect we’ll see both squads return to the NFC Championship this time around, but they can still surprise us if they wish.

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