Dak Prescott and Co are a balanced unit but on Sunday the Green Bay Packers and Aaron Rodgers showed they are only getting better as the season unfolds

Aaron Rodgers is on a run like almost none he has had in his career and suddenly it feels like he might be taking Green Bay to the Super Bowl.

All year people have talked about the decline of the NFL, suggesting the league isn’t the same because the quarterbacks are worse than in recent seasons. But 2016 ended with Tom Brady setting an NFL record with 28 touchdowns and only two interceptions, Drew Brees threw for 5,000 yards once more, Matt Ryan had an MVP year and, in his last seven games, Rodgers has put up numbers that many quarterbacks would consider to be promising seasons by themselves.

In that time he’s thrown for 2,029 yards, 19 touchdowns and zero interceptions. Only once in that stretch has he finished a game with a quarterback rating below 116.7. Most important, the Packers have won all seven of those games, having scrambled from a 4-6 record in late November to becoming a team the Dallas Cowboys will not want to face next weekend.

Watching him rip apart the aggressive, dominating New York Giants defense as he did in Sunday’s 38-13 wildcard round victory, it should be obvious that one of the NFL’s great quarterbacks is still great.

Despite a dismal start to Sunday’s game, he led the Packers to a touchdown late in the first-half by scrambling around as only he can, ducking pass rushers and spinning out of tackles before firing a pass into the end zone for a score. Then just before half-time he lobbed a long, Hail Mary pass from the 50 that flew over the Giants defenders in the end zone and into the hands of Randall Cobb for a touchdown that stood out not only for the drama of the moment – which broke the Giants - but the way Rodgers made it look easy.

“An excellent, instinctive play,” Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy said after the game.



Perhaps what struck home even more than the pass was the nonchalance with which Rodgers later described it – as if heaving the ball half the length of the field and having it evade a forest of defensive players is something he does daily.

“That’s three [completed Hail Marys] in the last calendar year or so,” he said with almost a shrug, referencing the game-tying throw in the playoffs against Arizona last January and the game-winner in Detroit in December of 2015.

Green Bay actually practices the play during their final walkthroughs the day before games. And while most quarterbacks seem to make their Hail Marys look like frantic heaves with little idea of where the ball will go, Rodgers actually appears to have a science for such a pass.

Is that possible?

Apparently so. Watch one of the hundreds of replays of his half-time pass to Cobb that will run in the coming days and see how the ball seemed to land exactly where Cobb was standing, just inside the end line. Observe, too, the way Cobb caught the pass as if he was the only player in the end zone, not one of 11 Packers and Giants who wound up in that tiny plot of grass to the side of the goalpost. This was a precision pass not some wild throw.

After the game, someone asked Rodgers if he had indeed calculated the exact way he was going to throw a pass most quarterbacks make by leaning back and throwing as hard as they can. For a moment he looked as if he was going to dismiss the idea by saying it was simply good fortune. But then he stopped, gazed in the distance for a second and appeared to realized that he couldn’t fool anyone by saying this pass was luck. It was anything but.

“I was thinking pre-snap how I was going to throw the football,” he finally said. “I was trying to judge how far I was going to drop back but I threw it from the 50 and in this type of weather with that kind of height on the ball it’s difficult to throw it out of the end zone.”

A little later he added: “I think we are starting to believe that anytime the ball goes up there you got a chance.”

When you throw Hail Marys that you suspect you will complete then you are playing very, very well. On Sunday, Rodgers lost one of his favorite receivers, Jordy Nelson, after Nelson took a hit in the side and still he wound up completing passes to six other players and finished with 362 yards passing and four touchdowns. Nothing seems to bother him now. He is in a place few quarterbacks reach, no matter how great they are.

Yes, the Cowboys who await next Sunday, have had an amazing season and seem as balanced as any Dallas team in the last two decades, but do the Cowboys – with their rookie quarterback – feel comfortable knowing that the best of Aaron Rodgers is coming to town? He has brought the Packers to a place no one believed to be possible just seven weeks ago.

What’s to keep him from taking Green Bay all the way to the Super Bowl?

Fantasy player of the week

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Le’Veon Bell made rushing look easy against the Dolphins. Photograph: Rob Carr/Getty Images

The Pittsburgh Steelers played their first playoff game with all of their four key offensive stars – quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, running back Le’Veon Bell, receiver Antonio Brown and center Maurkice Pouncey – healthy. It turns out the Steelers are very good if you put all four of them on the field at the same time. Evidence of this is the 367 yards they put up in Sunday’s 30-12 trampling of Miami.

Steelers crush Dolphins in NFL wildcard playoff thanks to Bell and Brown Read more

Who was the best on Sunday? That would be Bell who rumbled through the Dolphins for a Pittsburgh postseason record 167 yards on 29 carries. On a frigid afternoon, Bell churned around Dolphins tacklers who came to look cold, weary and tired of trying to tackle him. In addition to breaking a Franco Harris record that had lasted for 38 years, Bell scored two touchdowns. Given he had just seven rushing scores this season, it was a very good day for him.

But was it Bell who did in the Dolphins first or receiver Antonio Brown? After all, Brown took two first-quarter passes from quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and turned them into long touchdown runs that seemed to break Miami barely eight minutes into the game. His first score went 50 yards, his second 62. He finished the day with five catches for 124 yards and the two touchdowns. Not a bad day either.

So it doesn’t matter if you played Bell or Brown on your playoff fantasy team you did well either way.

Videos of the week

If I never watch another minute of the NFL playoffs I will be thrilled to leave these two catches as my final memory of the 2017 postseason. The fact they are made by Seahawks receiver Paul Richardson, whose three-year professional career has been marred by a torn ACL, makes them all the more satisfying.

Richardson probably wouldn’t have been playing Saturday night against Detroit had the team’s No3 receiver, Tyler Lockett, not broken his leg in Week 16. And yet where would Seattle have been without him on Saturday? With 7:14 left in the first half of a scoreless game, a fourth and goal play broke apart and quarterback Russell Wilson desperately heaved a pass toward the end zone where Richardson someone managed to catch the ball one-handed with Detroit’s Tavon Wilson attached to his chest.

That he caught the ball with his left hand while hooking Wilson’s facemask with his right makes the catch even more spectacular…and illegal.

Then in the fourth quarter he did this:

Jason McIntyre (@jasonrmcintyre) 2 years ago in the Super Bowl: Someone named Chris Matthews

Today, Paul Richardson

Seattle WRs: The new Patriots WRspic.twitter.com/pAyfAE6YvC

The best part of all: Richardson told USA Today that he doesn’t even work on one-handed catches in practice. Saturday’s grabs were simply by instinct.

Stat of the week

50. The number of years the Detroit Lions have gone since winning a road playoff game. It’s a remarkable number. But perhaps not too surprising given that the Lions have only played 11 postseason games since 1957. Defensively they played well against Seattle on Saturday and might have had a better chance of winning had they been able to generate much of an offense. The 231 yards they put up did not allow them to get close.

Another statistic that worked against the Lions … Seattle have now won 10 straight home playoff games.

Quote of the week

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Texans will continue to be led by Bill O’Brien ... for now. Photograph: Larry W Smith/EPA

“I don’t know where they get that. There’s nothing to it. I got a chuckle out of that. I’m not going to fire him. We’re already talking about next year. If I were you, I wouldn’t repeat it because it’s false.”

Given a normal time, in a year without his team’s quarterback instability, it would be odd for Houston owner Bob McNair tell the Houston Chronicle immediately after a playoff victory that he is keeping coach Bill O’Brien. But these don’t seem to be normal times in football. If Jim Caldwell’s job could be in jeopardy after putting up the best three-year run as Lions coach in decades, then O’Brien’s could as well in a division-winning season.

Rumors grew last week that O’Brien might be fired even if the Texans beat the Raiders on Sunday. There was even an NFL.com report that said teams with coaching vacancies suspected that O’Brien could soon be leaving the Texans. Houston has finished 9-7 in each of his three seasons with the team, which isn’t terrible considering the problems the team has had finding a franchise quarterback and this year’s season-ending injury to defensive star JJ Watt. Firing O’Brien would hardly fix whatever perceived problems Houston has.

The Texans dominance of the Raiders, albeit against third-string quarterback Connor Cook, would appear to be enough to allow O’Brien to stay no matter what happens next Saturday night at New England.