Tampa 38 Packers 28

Boooo!

The ingredients for a disaster were present and acknowledged.

1. A winless team, playing at home, coming off a bye week.
2. A dispirited team coming off it's second loss to the Vikings.
3. Old beat up OTs trying to step in and shore up a bad offensive line.

When you look at those second half Packer possessions on the drive chart, you see the run game gaining some traction behind Ahman Green only to stall out. This was foreshadowed in the first half when the Packers failed to convert good field positions into points. Here's the drive chart summary for the Packers second half possessions.

#1 punt (almost safety)
#2 interception on 1st & 10
#3 punt
#4 Rodgers runs for TD
#5 punt
#6 punt
#7 interception on 4th & 12 returned for TD

The offense didn't have any 4 & outs after the first possession where they were pinned on the goal line. But 4 of the 6 sacks came in the 4th quarter. In crunch time, things got harder and you could feel the Packers "trying not to lose" and they choked.

The unreliability of the offensive line is causing this anamic feeling. It's not just the sacks, it's not being able to a set of dependable plays... screen passes, slants, U-72 type runs. The bread & butter of the Packer offense has become the "quick strike". On the one score the Packers ground out early in the fourth quarter, the effort was immediately nullified by one of the few kickoffs Mason Crosby didn't put out of the endzone.

So add kick coverage (if you haven't already) to offensive line play to areas that repeatedly lets the rest of the team down. And now even punt protection is becoming an adventure. One get's the feeling that coaches are saying the same things over and over. Guys don't come free to block punts due bad coaching. No one coaches that. Maybe a player was under coached, or maybe they made a mistake on their own. Either way, the Packers seem to be devolving into a bad team despite having players that have shown plenty of ability in the past.

One aspect that will not be discussed in the Packer media, at least directly, is how this team had so much invested in beating the Vikings that it played a dispirited game afterwards. You could almost say that the Packers have lost 3 games to the Vikings counting this one. This is another aspect of putting Brett Favre behind them.

Maybe the Packers can use Grant & Green as a one-two punch as they hinted at in the 3rd quarter and build a more physical and confident offensive line through that? It's worth a try. This team can not survive on deep strikes from Rodgers to his WRs and defensive turnovers alone.