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Xavier McKinney gets brutally honest about Packers mentality entering playoffs

The vibes aren't great right now.
Cameron Ellis
Cameron Ellis

Lombardi Ave

New Orleans Saints v Green Bay Packers / Todd Rosenberg/GettyImages

At least they're not the Pittsburgh Steelers?

It's hard to imagine a worse way to start a playoff run than how the Green Bay Packers handled Week 18. With a (really) bad Chicago Bears team in town, Green Bay's final game of the regular season, in theory, should have been a quick, clean, preseason-esque win.

RELATED: Packers deliver heartbreaking Christian Watson injury update after Week 18

Instead, the Packers let the Bears hang around all game, saw their starting QB and WR2 leave the game with injuries, and ended their season with arguably the worst loss of the entire year.

Now they're headed to Philly with some truly awful vibes, as evident by Xavier McKinney's postgame interview on Sunday afternoon. If you're already nervous about this Sunday's game, I think you can probably just stop reading now. There's nothing for you here.

Xavier McKinney's quote about the Packers' morale doesn't inspire a ton of confidence

"Mentally, we know that we've got one game," McKinney said. "One chance. And so if we don't do it right, we'll be bounced. That's just the reality of it. So I think that's where we're at mentally. We've got to move on from this game ... It is what it is. Same stuff, every week. I think it's guys, individually, looking at themselves and saying, 'OK, what do we want to do? How far do we want to take this?' And I think that's just the reality of it."

Yiiiiiiikes. Week 18 locker room quotes are always a little more dramatic than other weeks, but this doesn't feel like a ringing endorsement of where the team's at heading into the playoffs. Losing to the Bears does things to a man, apparently.

So, yeah. Not a great start to the Wild Card week. I'm sure the quotes will sound a whole lot different today – get ready to hear the word 'flush' a lot – but it'll be hard to get the image of McKinney's pessimism (and those very fun shades) out of Packers fans' heads. It'd be a good day for another surprisingly optimistic Christain Watson injury update. At this point, I'll even take "literally anything besides the worst-case scenario."

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Cameron Ellis

Cameron Ellis

Cam Ellis is an NFL staff writer for FanSided, specializing in covering all 32 teams across the league, including the Las Vegas Raiders. He has a decade of experience in sports media, having spent time at 680 The Score in Chicago, ABC Denver, and NBC Sports Washington. Since 2014 his work has been featured on NBC Sports Chicago, The Ralphie Report, and various sites across Minute Media and FanSided. In his career he has covered the Super Bowl, NFL Draft, free agency, and is a regular part of gameday coverage.