Green Bay Must Get Lucky To Be Good

If there's one thing sports fans love, it's determinism. Winning comes from the performance of the players and coaches on our favorite teams. If we're losing, it's because they're doing poorly; if we're winning, it's because they're great. There's not a lot of room for dumb luck in the popular image of the NFL, even though it is arguably the deciding factor that separates teams who actually win the Super Bowl from teams that are good enough to but probably won't.

Dumb luck comes in a lot of different forms. It's the blown calls, one way or another, by a referee. It's the random bouncing of dropped balls that leads to a fumble recovery one way or the other, or passes tipped up into the air that get intercepted or miraculously caught. It's the injuries your best players get or don't get, or the injuries somebody else's team gets at the worst possible time (Christian Ponder, man). And it's the factors beyond a team's control that lead to its being able to complete for a playoff spot.

Here's an example that should be very familiar to Packers fans. In Week 15 of the 2010 season, the Packers were trailing the New York Giants and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the race for the No. 6 seed in the NFC. Having lost the previous game to Detroit and with Aaron Rodgers out with a concussion for that night's game against New England, things did not look good for Green Bay. But a funny thing happened on the way to Gillette Stadium. In one of the great comebacks in NFL history, Philadelphia somehow, some way, scored twenty-eight points in the final eight minutes of regulation, erased a 31-10 deficit to the Giants and won on a walk-off punt return TD. Just like that, the Giants were looking up at the Packers in the wild-card race.

Meanwhile, in Tampa Bay, career backup QB Drew Stanton led the 4-10 Lions to a ridiculous victory over the 8-5 Buccaneers, leading a late field goal drive to tie the game with no time remaining and another drive in overtime to win, 23-20. Stanton, who has started all of four games in his NFL career, threw for a career-high 252 yards and a TD and didn't turn the ball over. The two improbable victories over the Packers' competition rendered that night's game moot in the standings. Green Bay could lose to New England and still assure itself of a playoff spot if it won its final two games, and win them it did. The rest, as they say, is history.

That's what dumb luck looks like. You still have to play really, really well to take advantage of those breaks. But there's no getting around the fact that dumb luck, or 'circumstances beyond a team's control' if that sounds better, plays a decisive role in separating Super Bowl-winning teams from the pack of those that could but didn't. And that's the real reason that these little breaks are so important. In the NFL today, maybe a dozen teams in any given year are legitimately capable of winning a Super Bowl if everything goes their way.

You know that it's no longer the best team in the NFL that automatically wins. Since Pittsburgh beat Seattle as a No. 6 seed in Super Bowl XL, the following teams have won the Big Game: Indianapolis (3-seed), N.Y. Giants (5), Pittsburgh (2), New Orleans (1), Green Bay (6), N.Y. Giants (4), Baltimore (4). Two teams who earned a bye week in the past nine years!

As Packers fans were reminded in the 2011 playoffs, it's not the league's best team that wins the Super Bowl anymore. There's no President's Cup in the NFL. What counts is playing your best at the right time and praying your defense doesn't get destroyed by an offense that is not piloted by a human being (cough, Colin Kaepernick, /cough). The Packers are as good on paper as any team in football. They've got one of the best quarterbacks, the best outside linebacker, the wideouts, the secondary, maybe good running backs, maybe a good offensive line. As fans, we know they'll play hard, and smart, be good in the division, beat the teams they're supposed to beat, and probably wind up in the playoffs. Whether they can make it to another Super Bowl will be determined most by the quality of their play and the caliber of their coaching, but it's the dumb-luck little something extra that'll put them over the top (or sink them).