A Marauding In Minneapolis: Why the Green Bay Packers beat the Minnesota Vikings
By Kenn Korb
Dragonfire From Deep
After some (massively overblown) struggles in the first half of the year, Aaron Rodgers has returned to being the quarterback we’ve come to expect.
Since Week 7, nobody rates higher in terms of PFF’s grading system, and his production has been excellent: from Weeks 8-15, he accumulated a 67.7% completion percentage (would be tied for 4th-best in the league over the full season) while averaging 285.6 yards per game (5th), 7.88 yards per pass attempt (5th), a 109.8 passer rating (3rd) and a 73.5 QBR (6th; strangely lower than his actual full-season mark of 4th somehow) while adding in a 19:3 TD:INT ratio.
How does Rodgers follow a stretch like that up? With perhaps his best game of the season.
Against the Vikings he put up a stellar line: 28/38 for 347 yards (a 9.13 yards-per-attempt average), 4 TD passes (and a rushing TD as well), 136.6 passer rating, and a 95.4 passer rating.
Where my focus is directly relates to in this performance is that yards-per-attempt number. For the better part of two seasons, we have heard many (including myself) talk about the profound lack of the deep passes in this offense, and that number tends to show a direct correlation with long completions for an offense.
Look at the first six games of the year: Rodgers only reached 7.00 ypa twice, failing to even reach 6.00 in all four of those other contests; deep passes were few and far between in those games. Since then it has risen dramatically, but we hadn’t quite seen a stellar deep performance of the magnitude which Rodgers and company provided for us against Minnesota.
Nine different times, Rodgers connected with one of his receivers for passes of at least 15 yards. He hit Jordy for passes of 15, 21, 48, and 33 yards, with the second one going for a touchdown. He found Davante Adams for 19 and 20 yards (the second being a touchdown). Youngster Geronimo Allison got in the mix for a couple as well (15 and 32 yards), and Jared Cook finished off the long strikes with a 30 yarder of his own.
Those deep shots accounted for 233 of Rodgers’ 347 yards on the afternoon. Not only that, but eight of those nine on scoring drives, with two directly becoming scores.
The deep ball may have been missing at one point for these guys, but Rodgers and his receiving crew found it more consistently than we’ve seen from them in years against one of 2016’s tougher defenses in a game Green Bay absolutely needed to win.