The beauty of the DVR is that I can go back and watch a game several days after it’s played.
Of course, the curse with the NFL is that’s it’s unlikely that I’ll get to watch it without having learned the result. The score of this game would have lead one to believe that it was a pretty close, well-contested game and that the nightcap of the Monday night doubleheader was just horrible.
I’m still not sure about the Denver vs. Oakland debacle, but this game really wasn’t anywhere near as close as the score seems to indicate.
First, I don’t wish to credit Aaron Rodgers with having overcome playing in the shadow of the Brett Favre legacy a mere one game into his career as Green Bay’s starter, but he definitely played well enough Monday. He definitely made some nice plays and looked like an NFL quarterback, for the most part. He certainly didn’t look out of place
It certainly didn’t make him look any worse to be compared to the only other quarterback taking snaps in the game that evening: Tavares Jackson.
Simply put, Jackson might be the least-capable quarterback I’ve ever seen given the starter’s job, unless you count his 2007 version. Without looking at the statistics, I doubt he completed even 50% of his attempts and several of the completions he did have were thrown so poorly that he kept the receiver from being able to get any yards after the catch.
Now, he did have a few nice runs and made a couple of decent passes, but that simply isn’t enough in the NFL for a starting quarterback, especially in an offense that has such a strong ground game. With teams stacking the box in seemingly-futile attempts to stop Adrian Peterson, Jackson should have things at least slightly easier than some of his peers, but it never looks that way.
My favorite play was one where Jackson was rolling to his left while being pursued by a Packer defender. He had a receiver maybe five yards in front of him, where he could have just flicked the ball in the air to be caught. Instead, he inexplicably jumped up and backwards while slinging the ball sort of sidearm.
If you guessed it was an incompletion, you’d be correct.
Also, I don’t how when the last time when Peterson played an entire season of football, but he does seem to be a little fragile. He runs upright a lot, which always seems to end up being a bad thing, health-wise.
Reminds me…’All Day’ seems a funny choice of nickname for a guy who gets injured annually. I guess it’s better than ‘Every Day,’ but still.
On the other side, moving the ball seemed to come with relative ease for the Packers. I still don’t get how Ryan Grant is a legit running back, be he seems to have a good time running the ball. Apparently, he was also running on a bit of a bum leg and may not even play against the Lions Sunday, so he must be pretty good to have had a decent day against Minnesota, who is meant to be able to defend the run fairly ably.
I had predicted a rather bad season for the NFC North, with only the Vikings finishing above .500 and only just. After week one, I see the potential for having underestimated Green Bay and Chicago and overestimating Minnesota, but it’s always easy to overreact to week one. We’ll see if things don’t even out a little bit this weekend.
