Packers Take It Somewhere Unpleasant from 49ers
By djlombardi
Last night the Packers took it hard in your favorite body cavity from the San Francisco 49ers. But guess what? I don’t really care. The porous offensive line, despicable backup quarterback play, lack of a rushing attack, and inability to stop the San Francisco 49ers(!) offense should concern me. But it doesn’t. At least not at this portion of the blog. “Why not?”, you are asking. Well as some of you know, as a Baltimorean (that dislikes the Ravens), I live outside of the viewing market for Packers games. And I don’t have DirecTV or any of that fancy stuff. So I have to follow games online. Anyway, last night the Olympics took priority over the preseason. As I wrote at an unreasonable hour in the morning on Ramblings From The Suburbs, the performance of Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps trumps the NFL Preseason (Bark it up!). Hard to believe, right? Some NFL team should bring Bolt in for a workout. Now that would be something to see. The 6’5″ world’s fastest man catching bombs from Aaron Rodgers? I like it. But now, back from fantasy Olympic land.
"“We just stunk,” offensive tackle Mark Tauscher said. “You can’t color it and put it in any other light. We flat-out stunk, and from an offensive standpoint, there’s nothing you can say. We flat-out were no good.”"
I think that summarizes the overall performance. Since this is not a regular season game, I’m not going to go through and give all the individual stats and such. I’ll just cover the topics that I said I was not concerned about above.
Porous Offensive Line Play
The offensive line has long been a strong point of Green Bay Packers football. It wasn’t last night. Granted, they were playing a talented 3-4 defense, but people, it’s the San Fran-freaking-cisco 49ers. That’s not supposed to happen, even in preseason. The offensive line gave up six sacks last night, four of which were on the first team offensive line. Rodgers’ play was shaky from there on out. I think the poor quarterback play could be a direct correlation from the offensive line play, but still, it was bad.
Despicable Backup Quarterback Play
So everyone thinks Brian Brohm is the backup quarterback. Hell, some people wanted the Packers to ditch Rodgers for Brohm. He had the job locked up from the time he was drafted, right? Not so fast, my friend. Brohm has been struggling. Last night he was 4-9 for 33 yards and a fumble. Not good. Matt Flynn has quietly worked his way up into contention and could possibly beat out Brohm. I’m starting to wonder if Ted Thompson is starting to regret his decision not to bring in a veteran quarterback, but something tells me he isn’t. If he is doubting himself, he’s screwed as most of the decent backups are off the market. A trade could possibly be in the works. Possibly.
Lack of a Rushing Attack
Kregg Lumpkin rushed for 51 yards on 10 carries. That boy is supposed to be cut by now. Noah Herron rushed for 35 yards on six carries. I didn’t think he’d be able to stay on the team either. His main competition for the number three running back, Vernand Morency, rushed for a single yard on his single carry. He was the leading receiver for the team, however, with one reception for 20 yards. Brandon Jackson had 10 yards rushing. The rushing attack is not looking good. Ryan Grant needs to get healthy and get his ass back out on the field. It’s great and all that he came to the voluntary workouts while holding out, but come on man, I’d rather have you skip the voluntary workouts and come into training camp on time. Grant has set himself, Rodgers, the offensive line, and the offense back by not coming into camp on time. I am absolutely furious right now about this. Of course, as I said about the despicable backup quarterback play, the running game’s lackluster performance (except for Lumpkin) can be based off of the offensive line’s horrible play.
Inability to Stop the 49ers Offense
The defense was disgusting this game. It’s J.T. O’-freaking-Sullivan torching the Packers for 154 yards. What the hell? Bring this up to par. Brandon Chillar may have moved ahead of Brady Poppinga in the race for the final linebacker spot. Yeah. I actually had already had this part written but it got deleted and I forget most of it. The Packers D needs to shape up. I know it’s only preseason, and preseason does not matter overall, but I am rather concerned.
We do have hope however. I remember an epic year where the Minnesota Vikings went 4-0 in the preseason, only to sputter, and finish in last place. So hope remains for the Packers.