Luckily for the Green Bay Packers, Super Bowls are not won or lost in Week 12 of a season.
In fact, recent history suggests that getting served a dish of humble pie late in the season has actually become a prerequisite for NFC teams qualifying for the Super Bowl over the last handful of years.
Sunday in New York, the Packers got their serving. They may have gone in for seconds and thirds as the Giants rather easily and efficiently blew out Green Bay, 38-10. The 28-point loss represented the largest final deficit for the Packers since 2007 (35-7, at Chicago), and the first time since 2008 that the team had lost a regular-season game by 14 or more points (51-29, at New Orleans).
(SNIP)
Back in Week 12 of 2007, the Minnesota Vikings handed the Giants a 41-17 whooping in New York. Eli Manning threw four picks, three of which were returned for touchdowns as the Tarvaris Jackson-led Vikings steamrolled what looked like a dying football team.
Instead of kissing a 7-4 start goodbye, New York came alive. The Giants won three of their last five games, qualified for the postseason and got hot at the right time. A little over two months after getting embarrassed at home by the lowly Vikings, the Giants were on top of the football world.
Almost four years later, the Giants pulled off nearly the same trick.
Believe it or not, this was an Associated Press headline from the New Orleans Saints 49-24 laugher win over the Giants on Monday night in Week 12 last season Drew Brees accounts for 5 TDs as Saints demolish fading Giants
Fading? Try just waking up. Once again, the blowout loss to a top NFC team meant relatively little. The Giants won three of their last five regular-season games, entered the playoffs with the worst record of the six NFC teams and then rode Manning to another Super Bowl title.
The Cardinals have similar tales from the 2008 season, when Arizona was blown out in several late-season games (48-20 at Philadelphia, Week 13; 35-14 vs. Minnesota, Week 15; 47-7 at New England, Week 16). Those same Cardinals then won four straight decisions before Ben Roethlisberger’s late heroics in Super Bowl XLIII snatched away what could have been a world championship.
This team could even draw from the 2010 Packers, even though that club did not technically suffer a loss quite like Sunday’s 38-10 fall. However, those Super Bowl winners were punched in the mouth on the road by the Detroit Lions, a loss that made winning the franchise 13th world championship look more like the stuff of fantasy than a real possibility.
Yet Green Bay won two of their last three games, snuck into the postseason on the last day and then witnessed quite possibly the best stretch of playoff quarterback play in the history of the game. Left for dead in Week 14, the Packers won Super Bowl XLV.
The moral of this story: There is no such thing as a knockout blow in Week 12.
As the Packers can attest to last season, the best team in Week 12 wins nothing more than a jump in hundreds of meaningless power rankings. These days, the team kissing the Lombardi Trophy in February is usually the one that punches their ticket to the dance no matter the seed and then gets all the moves right in the postseason.
Despite an ugly rendition Sunday night, these Packers still have ample time to get their steps in rhythm for the games that really matter.