Green Bay Packers: NFC Championship Game special teams recap
By Kenn Korb
Mason Crosby
Kickoffs:
- ATL -3; 23 yard return (ATL 20)
- Touchback
- *Onside Kick – ATL Recovery* 9 yard return (GB 33)
- *Onside Kick – ATL Recovery* 0 yard return (50)
Scoring:
- Extra points: 1/1
- Field goals: 0/1 (Miss: 41 yards)
Well, that was a massive step down.
After putting up his best-ever performance against the Dallas Cowboys in the Divisional Round the previous week, it seemed perfectly reasonable to expect Mason Crosby to follow up that showing with another positive outing. It only took a single offensive drive to change that hope entirely.
With the offense stalling out on their first drive, Crosby had a chance to still get the Packers on the board and be down just 7-3 rather than 7-0. With his NFL record streak of 23 straight made field goals still going, it seemed guaranteed — especially after the way he hit two from 50+ the previous week and now was kicking merely from 41 yards out.
Automatic, it was not; Crosby pulled the kick wide right.
That kick ended up being the majority of his opportunity to make any impact at all. He had just a single other scoring opportunity — an extra kick, which he converted — and only four total kickoffs.
Of those four kickoffs, half were onside kicks (due to the massive deficit facing the team by the time they finally started getting into the endzone). Neither of those was recovered by the Packers (and even had they recovered both — based on recovery rates on onside kicks, that’s a 10% chance for each individual opportunity, by the way — the team would still have been looking at a 37-31 deficit at best while still needing to force Atlanta to give the ball back with little time remaining). The other two saw a blaise return to the Atlanta 20 yard line and a touchback.
Crosby didn’t have a good nor impactful day, but pushing his kick wide right was the first tangible sign of the comedy of errors and bad breaks that were on the horizon for Green Bay as a whole in this game.