Rich: Why the Green Bay Packers Could Win the NFC North (and the Super Bowl)

The Green Bay Packers got booed off their own field in week three. They don't look like that team anymore.

Rich traced the turnaround back to that Lambeau loss to Atlanta, the one that drew boos and a pointed "that's unhelpful" from Tucker Kraft. Since then Green Bay went to Tampa and survived, took a Bears team it wanted to take to the woodshed and did exactly that, and then handled the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday night.

The Tampa win looks better by the week. Rich suggested the Bucs' defense may be "pretty damn good" and capable of making a lot of quarterbacks look pedestrian, noting that Aaron Rodgers needed four and a half quarters to beat Tampa on Sunday in what he called a very impressive performance by Rodgers, Germie Bernard and the Steelers as a whole.

Against Chicago, the Packers went up top to Christian Watson and Matthew Golden. Against Dallas, the two of them did it again. Golden, Rich pointed out, took until last year's playoffs to break through. Now he's the first Packers player with consecutive 100-yard receiving games within a season since Davante Adams in 2021.

Then there's Jordan Love. Rich called him superb, and said he was taking it on the chin, too. Love threw for 276 yards and ran for his first rushing touchdown of the season. The game snapped his five-game streak to open the year with multiple passing touchdowns, but Rich's take was simple: "he earned everything, all of it."

Matt LaFleur sounded just as impressed. "He keeps battling," LaFleur said afterward. "We talk about playing like a G. He's a G. And he does a great job just commanding the offense, and he's doing a great, great job converting critical third downs throughout the course of the game."

That quote sent the studio sideways. Rich wondered aloud whether a G was a young gangster or some new Packers-specific phrase. Someone offered that real Gs move in silence. "Like lasagna," came the reply.

The defense deserves its own paragraph. Green Bay has now allowed 14 or fewer points in three straight games, tied with the Bears from weeks two through four for the longest streak by any team this season and the Packers' longest since 2016. And the Packers lead the league in first halves without allowing a point, their NFL-high fifth time doing it since the start of last season.

All of that, Rich noted, is happening while the Packers' own run game is non-existent, six straight games under 100 rushing yards. Josh Jacobs is coming back, which means this team is "only going to get better." The defense is tightening in exactly the way everyone keeps waiting for the Dallas defense to tighten.

Now the schedule gets real. At 4-2, the Packers go to Detroit, then host Carolina, then play a Thursday night game at New England, then host Minnesota. Rich called it the stretch where the rubber meets the road.

His math was clean. Win three of those four, and the Packers have proven their bones and can be considered Super Bowl contenders. Split them, and they still can be. Either way, they're in the mix for the division.

The biggest tell for Rich wasn't any single stat. It was that the team on the Lambeau turf Sunday night looked nothing like the one that played the home opener. That's improvement, the thing you're looking for. And, as he pointed out, it's the thing nobody has seen out of Dallas.