SB Nation Power Rankings: Packers Up To No. 2

Vick getting stopped by Clay Matthews on a critical 4th-and-1 to effectively end the game. He had a shot to win, couldn’t get it done. He brought the Eagles most of the way back.

Yeah, those blitz schemes they run are tricky. Their defense as a whole is really, really fast.

But this is one where there are still a lot of people who have a strong animosity towards someone who in fact did kill dogs, not to mention the other things he did to them before killing them. People have a fairly strong attachment to their animals, elevated to almost family-like status, so it is hard for them to detach themselves from what actually had occurred.

For instance, Bill Plaschke wrote this recently.

I would also qualify the statement by including other players who have committed devious acts such as Stallworth.

What you may see as childish, others see as truth.

will be focused, like they were the Dallas game. They usually are come the second half of the season.

It’s the first half of the season where they tend to lay a stinker or two.

Can we lose? Yeah. But I don’t think we will.

Pro football is finally an entertainment business. To say that they don’t pay attention to what’s being said or written about them is like saying that an actor doesn’t read reviews of his performance. Perception is where their bread is buttered. Another example would be a politician watching the polls.

It’s also just human nature. If somebody wrote something about your job performance, you’re telling me that you’re going to ignore it? You would probably say “oh, I don’t care about that stuff; I pay attention to things I can control” or something, just like they do when talking to the media. But, the truth is, you (like anybody) would soak it all up and never forget it.

Now, do I think that Curly Lambeau’s reply to Strohman affects the way the Packers will play on Sunday? No, I don’t. That’s why I have a sense of humor about the whole thing (or at least I did until you statistician-cyborgs started raining on my parade). However, this blog site does have a fairly prominent link on SI.com (which is how I found it), and I would not be surprised to find out that there are players and employees of the Packers checking it out, at least from time to time. What “I” say doesn’t matter much, if at all. But, what “we” say (meaning the writers and fans as a whole) does absolutely matter. This is all free advertising that is either good or bad for them. Again, not that they surf every comment on every blog, but they absolutely have a pretty good sense of what people generally are thinking and saying.

Therefore, if they think that people’s perception of them is high, there is a devil on their shoulder that will whisper “you can kinda’ coast here for awhile if you want.”