Champs for a Day

Don't you wish that we could take a few of the extra points from today's game and get to decide where to allocate them in other games? It wouldn't take many. If we could move just 9 of those points to other games, the Packers would be 4-1 right now, and they still would have won today's game by the score of 43-3. Yes, I know, and if pigs could fly, etc. . . . .

Anyway, if you are going to act like world champs for a day, it is nice to do it right before a bye week, to let some of the bad feelings and bitterness blow away for a couple of weeks. It honestly has occurred to me over the past few weeks that the Packers are not as bad as their record. When the Packers start losing games by a point, with the difference being the first Ryan Longwell missed extra point in over 150 games, you can be sure that the Packers are not that far away from being a competitive team. But, on the other hand, it is precisely those little things that mark the dividing line between a poor team trying to learn how to win all over again (like the Packers in the Cleveland, Tampa Bay, and Carolina games) and a better team that manages to hang on and "win ugly" (like the Browns, Buccaneers and Panthers in those same games).

It is even more clear that, if the Packers were not as bad as their 0-4 record, they are not even close to being as good as they looked today. This was one of those games where just about everything went right (other than Najeh Davenport's season-ending injury, that is), and once it started going that way, things just snowballed on the poor Saints. They have got a few other things on their minds these days, and as Chris Berman said after the game, they are unfortunately going to have some games like that this year. So let's wait for the Packers to put together a few more good games before we start to think they have turned the season around.

For now, it will be enough if they can get a few of their injured players ready to go to Minnesota in a couple of weeks, and then try to string a few wins together. If they can do that, given how bad this division looks this year, they might actually have something going.

Andrew Chen update. The young man from northern California, who attended his first Packer game a few weeks ago, has put his name on the Packer season ticket waiting list. I forget his exact number on the list, but it is something over 69,000. It looks like a long wait.