Packers: Digging deep as the season continues to take away
By David Ruiz
The 2010 Green Bay Packers season will forever go down as one the greatest put together by a franchise.
Both clicking at the right time and overcoming a huge volume of players lost.
Fast-forward to the 2021 season and they will once again be determined by how much adversity this team can take and its willingness to move towards its goal of winning another Super Bowl.
Packers injuries piling up
The latest loss of a key player comes in the form of Elgton Jenkins, who tore his ACL on Sunday against the Minnesota Vikings in a 34-31 loss. With David Bakhtiari still out for the foreseeable future, the strength of the O-line has taken a massive hit.
The Packers got to breathe a little when star RB Aaron Jones suffered a sprained MCL injury rather than a torn ACL that would’ve ended his season. While AJ Dillon has provided the boom in Jones’ absence, missing a 1,000-yard runner and red-zone weapon such as Jones isn’t a player you’d like to be down as the weather gets colder.
The Packers still continue to find out what they have in TE Josiah Deguara after Robert Tonyan was lost for the season weeks prior against the Arizona Cardinals. While the Packers still have Marcedes Lewis at tight end, his role is more of a pass-blocker than a receiver.
Deguara should develop into Tonyan’s role of stretching a defense but we’ve learned that if a player doesn’t earn Aaron Rodgers’ trust on the field, then they won’t see much action — *cough* Amari Rodgers *cough*.
No team is going to feel sorry for the Packers
Amidst a season where every team suffers injuries both major and minor, and throw on top of that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, all 32 teams have their battles they must endure.
Whether it was Rodgers getting COVID-19 and missing a game that saw Jordan Love make his first NFL start, or when Davante Adams and Marquez Valdes-Scantling have missed time against premier opponents, the NFL world continues to spin.
The correlations between the 2010-Super Bowl-winning team and the 2021 version mirror each other greatly. No one felt sorry for that Wild Card team down a plethora of impact players, and no one will feel sorry for a team missing Jones, Bakhtiari, Za’Darius Smith, Jaire Alexander, and Jenkins, plus any other notable injuries that may potentially happen between now and February.
But that’s what makes a good season into an incredible one. Knowing the odds are heavily stacked against you, that you might be without key players for a deep playoff run, and the threat that COVID may throw a wrench into any and all plans.
We know this Packers team isn’t short on talent, and the fact that it has the talent to compete on an even playing field with Arizona, Tampa Bay, Los Angeles, etc.
How the season will play out is anyone’s guess, but the 2021 Packers know they have to dig deep out of a hole that has taken so much, in such a short amount of time.