Cheese Curds, 9/9: The Super Bowl is the only goal in Green Bay

It’s a good practice to ask what outcomes for a given team would represent success or failure.

In theory, any team that doesn’t win a Super Bowl in a given year has failed. That’s the goal of NFL football, and only one team can reach that goal.

That strikes me as the wrong approach, though. We all know that only a few teams have a realistic shot at winning the ultimate prize every year. Other teams are working for other things, whether that’s breaking in a new coach, building up their roster, or suffering through a down season while they escape cap purgatory.

The Green Bay Packers aren’t one of those teams, though. They’re firmly in the “contender” category. The reigning MVP is still in town, the rest of the roster is deep and talented, and they’re the only team other than the Chiefs that has advanced to at least the conference championship game each of the last two seasons.

And that reveals the problem: the Chiefs have made two straight Super Bowls, winning one. The Packers have twice come up short.

Success, then, for the Packers means succeeding where they’ve failed the last two years. For this to be a successful year, the Packers need to make it to the Super Bowl and win. If they don’t, it will be hard to characterize this year as anything other than a failure.

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