Will Aaron Rodgers Be This Bad Again?

The Green Bay Packers went to San Francisco and got thoroughly beaten in all facets of the game. They left town with a 37-8 loss, diminished hopes of snagging homefield advantage throughout the playoffs, and the homework of heading back to Wisconsin and going back to the drawing board.

Aaron Rodgers was as bad as we've ever seen him. There is no sugarcoating how ugly things got. The future Hall of Famer averaged less than 2 yards/dropback and posted a QBR of 8.5.

Nothing Green Bay tried helped stem the rushing tide of a ferocious San Francisco defense. The same thing happened when the Bay Area boys had the ball. One team looked like the class of the NFC. The other looked like an extremely unserious playoff participant.

So was this an aberration or a dour sign of things to come? How you answer that question probably reveals way more about the Niners than Packers. Because we know exactly what Rodgers is after all these years, and imagining him turning in a similar performance come mid-January is hard to fathom. That is, unless this SF defense is an equal cog in a team that's done nothing but announce its regular season superiority to the rest of the field week in and week out.

Just my two cents: Green Bay should have tossed all digital media from this game out of the airplane as it flew back East. Surely there are lessons to be learned and adjustments to be made. But Sunday night was an extreme version of the poles each team is capable. All this to say: if there's another matchup with more on the line, one shouldn't expect it to look like a carbon copy.