Kings of the North: Why the Green Bay Packers beat the Detroit Lions
By Kenn Korb
Rushing Hydra
The run game sure has improved since the early season.
After barely being able to find bodies to take handoffs towards the middle of the year, Green Bay all of a sudden has an embarrassment of options they have to feel comfortable feeding the ball to in stretches. It truly seems they find some new player of stylistic combination each week, and against the Lions it was no different.
In this one we saw a strong joining of power, elusiveness, and scrambles to put up what became a statistically excellent day on the ground for Green Bay.
The power was provided early and often by Aaron Ripkowski. The fullback hadn’t seen much offensive burn this year outside of blocking, but when he did get the ball he proved to be impossible to take down without a handful of guys converging on him at once. His surprisingly high workload (9 carries, 61 yards; also a 7 yard TD catch) probably doesn’t get repeated barring injuries around him, but that ability to constantly bash through the opponent for decent chunks of yardage (seven of his nine runs gained at least 5 yards; two gained 10+) is the sort of hard-charging weapon needed for the playoffs.
The elusiveness was provided by Ty Montgomery. He has already proved to be great a making guys miss, and brought some more of that to the table here (along with his own showings of power and speed). It was a slow start for Montgomery (only one first-half carry), but he turned in solid chunk gains in the second half (five of seven second-half carries went for over 5 yards, including one for 11) as the Packers turned an early deficit into a huge lead.
Then comes the scrambling. The yardage provided wasn’t quite as strong overall, but the overall impact of Aaron Rodgers being able to scramble around healthily was not only good to see — especially after those multiple leg injuries sapped away parts of that ability for a solid two months — but was a strong influence in not only preventing sacks but turning busted plays into something. Taking out the three kneel downs from the end of the game, Rodgers picked up 46 yards on 7 scrambles — two of which hit at least 12 yards. The yardage itself didn’t matter on most of these; instead, just the fact that Rodgers turned probable negative plays into positive ones made all the difference.
Between these guys, we saw 147 of Green Bay’s 153 rushing yards. These three each provide their own unique contributions to the run game. Add in Christine Michael (only 6 yards in this one, but has done better with bigger workloads in other contests since being brought onto the roster) and the Packers have gone from having to throw on nearly every snap midway through the year to being a team capable of tearing apart a defense in a multitude of different ways on the ground.