Perspective From The Afterlife

I'm coming straight at you from the right hand of Sports Bottle's god to spout some overreaction, and maybe some glass half-full stuff after my heart exploded in the last two minutes yesterday.

I think I'll start with the negatives since I find myself able to write much lengthier recaps when the Packers lose. It really is amazing how little I have to write about when we win. I've probably already written more today than I had in the last five weeks. Does that make me negative? Maybe. I just think I don't have access to blow the players like the real media does, so it would seem to be a huge waste of everyone's time for me to pat anyone on the back. ANYWAYS

-Jarrett Bush. I mean, seriously. Why is he not playing for the Tennesee Titans? He is incapable of playing corner. Partially due to injuries and I presume partially due to the fact that Pittsburgh ran the Houston Oilers offense from the late 80's, Bush was on the field the entire game. He single handedly cost us 10 points. Both of the long catches he gave up were inexcusable. He completely stopped running on the first one. Both times, he had no clue where the ball was, and it was in the air for roughly 45 seconds. So frustrating. At a minimum you should be able to make a play on the ball with both of those passes. I just don't understand how you let a receiver run past you after 15 seconds. Usually when a guy gets beat, someone else is at least partially to blame. But on both of those passes, it seemed pretty clear that Bush was manned up on the guy.

-Mason Crosby. I'm trying to come up with a good corollary here if he still has a job by Monday afternoon. George Bush did a pretty terrible job at president for a while there (8 years). Matt Millen in Detroit? I think that is a pretty good one. Ned Yost? A 34 yard field goal is nearly automatic in the NFL. Thompson should have been on the horn during the game looking for a new kicker, because Dallas is probably also looking for one this week. I think that he is 1/3 responsible for the loss. I realize that it seems funny to say, and probably a stretch given everything that happened, but that FG was HUGE. There is no way there isn't someone on the street that can hit a 34 yarder 90+% of the time. It is so bad now that I really believe we are better off going for it on almost all 4th downs. That I was sure we would lose if we didn't score a TD on that last drive. I'm going to write my congressmen or something. His ineptitude is getting out of hand.

-503 YARDS???? I mean wow. We couldn't cover ANYONE. We sat in zone, and he destroyed us. We blitzed and Big Ben would break two tackles, locate Bush, and hit a wide open receiver. It was sick. Did the Steelers expose our secondary? Also, the Psycho defense doesn't work against future Hall of Fame QBs, I think we've settled that. Woodson had his worst game of the season by far. I don't believe the referees helped anything. A.J. Hawk and B.J. Raji are not capable of guarding Heath Miller.

-8 carries??? I dislike Ryan Grant. A-Rodg is awesome, and the passing game was unstoppable. So it is hard to complain about the offense. But we ran the ball less than 10 times. In an NFL game. Perhaps we could have kept that ball out of the Steelers hands? I'm pretty much nit picking.

THE POSITIVES?

-A-Rodg. May have been better than the guy that threw for 503 yards. He also torched a top 5 defense. He was amazing. Somehow, some asshole on a radio call in is going to blame him for "not winning in the 4th quarter".

-Jermichael Finley. Even though he wears a disturbing jersey (child size small, name on the back is 1/4 the size of everyone else's), he is really, really good.

-36 points. We did plenty enough to win on offense. I don't think there is any doubt how good the offense is when Rodgers isn't getting killed.

-Clay Matthews. The guy is incredible. 10+ sacks in his rookie year. And he clearly got hosed out of another one.

The Pack refuses to make this easy on anyone. Just when it looked like they were a shoo-in for the five seed, everything went wrong this weekend. If the Giants win tonight, we have a bit of a mess on our hands. We should beat Seattle handily next weekend, but there are no guarantees. Arizona now officially has nothing to play for, so we are getting Leinart in week 17. So we are still in pretty good shape.

I'm not sure you can be that broken up about losing to the Steelers on the last play of the game on a semi-miraculous throw and catch. I just hope the defensive performance was a blip in an otherwise great season. Ben R. was having a pretty great year, so it wasn't like it was completely out of the question for him to play well, I just wasn't really expecting to lose a game that we scored 36 points in. I still think we are OK. As long as we get rid of Crosby.