As the NFL season winds towards a close, the league begins to separate from itself. There becomes a clear divide between the Super Bowl contenders and those fighting for draft position. Teams jockeying for a first-round bye are separated from those simply trying to get into the playoffs in the first place, although in this season’s NFC, those lines tend to blur. As the weather turns colder, the fans, if not the entire country, begins to focus on the dozen teams that appear destined to meet for the right to raise the Lombardi Trophy at the end of the year.
It can be distracting.
“We’ve just got to do everything that we’ve been doing,” Cam Newton said ahead of the team’s meeting with the Green Bay Packers; Carolina’s third marquee matchup in as many weeks after facing New Orleans and Minnesota the past two Sundays. “I think, for us, playing complementary football and not letting the distractions interfere with our preparations or whatever it may be; us staying on rhythm as a whole unit can get us to that point. A lot of times, especially with the young guys that we’ve got on this team, the distractions aren’t always negative things. ”
“The biggest distraction may be us having a lot of success.”
While a team that has won five of it’s last six and is rushing for almost 200 yards per game in it’s last five contests can certainly generate a lot of attention, that may not be true this week, with a certain Green Bay Packers quarterback announcing on Instagram that he was medically cleared to return after missing eight weeks with a broken collarbone.
After Aaron Rodgers was injured in a Week 6 loss on a hit by Vikings linebacker Anthony Barr and the quarterback had surgery to repair his broken bone, almost immediately the questions began about whether he would be able to return, should the Packers still be in playoff contention when he was eligible to come off injured reserve.
“I want to be healthy, that’s the most important thing,” Rodgers told reporters in early November. “But if we’re healthy in eight weeks and it would make sense to come back, then I’m going to come back. It comes down to how fast the bone heals. If it heals and we’re in the right position, then there’s a conversation. If the bone isn’t healed, there’s absolutely no conversation to be had.”
Well, the bone is healed; the 7-6 Packers are on the fringe of the playoff picture, and a clean sweep of the final three games will be not just helpful, but necessary to continue the Packers’ streak of eight straight playoff appearances.
Many people will draw comparisons to Aaron Rodgers’ previous return from a broken collarbone break in 2013, when the two-time MVP returned from the injury for the final week of the season after missing seven games to lead the Packers to a 33-28 victory over the Bears and send them to the playoffs, but this situation is slightly different than that 2013 comeback story that seemed to come directly from Hollywood.
Most importantly, the clavicle that Rodgers broke just two months ago is on his throwing shoulder; instead of allowing it to heal naturally, the quarterback chose to have plates and 13 screws inserted into his collarbone to secure it. A recovering throwing shoulder weighs a lot heavier on a quarterback’s performance than an almost-healed bone on the opposite side.
The other big difference? The team to which Rodgers was returning. In 2013, the Packers relied on the bruising Pro Bowler Eddie Lacy, who had amassed 1,400 total yards and 11 touchdowns that season. The 2017 version uses a two-headed monster of Aaron Jones and Jamaal Williams, two young and talented runners to be sure, but perhaps not enough to take the pressure of off Rodgers.
The pressure might be the problem. In 2013, before he exited with the broken collarbone, Rodgers was only being sacked on 6.8% of his dropbacks. In 2017, he was sacked nineteen times in five games; accounting for 9% of his dropbacks before giving way to rookie Brett Hundley with the broken collarbone. Hundley fared not much better, being dropped on 8.7% of his 252 attempts through eight games.
Photo: Grant Halverson/Getty Images
That will make life difficult for Rodgers when he returns on Sunday, as the Panthers are tied for third in the league with 40 sacks on the season, bringing down the opposing quarterback on 9.24% of their dropbacks and coming off a game in which they got to Case Keenum for six sacks last Sunday. Previous to the Panthers sack party, the Vikings had only allowed nine sacks on the year.
The Packers have allowed 43.
Perhaps all of these are the reasons that the Panthers are not allowing the return of Rodgers to distract them. Or perhaps they knew all along that he would be coming back.
“It was said that he could come back, and the approach was that he was going to be back; that’s the way we looked at it,” Ron Rivera said, commenting multiple times that Rodgers had probably been throwing for four or five weeks already. “As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter who plays, we’ve still got to play the Packers. They said that he was going to be back for our game; that’s what we expected: him to be back. I don’t want our guys getting caught up in it, I want our guys focusing on getting prepared.”
“In all honesty, we expected it. It was reported and I told our guys, I told them on Monday, I told them [this] morning, ‘Guys, he’s playing.’ OK, great. We expected it.”
Defensive end Wes Horton was more succinct in his analysis.
“Let him come back. Let him play against us.”
“We’ll be ready for him.”
