This Sunday’s matchup between the Green Bay Packers and New England Patriots is not just a matchup of the two hottest teams in the NFL, it is a matchup of the two best franchises in the NFL.
The Packers and the Patriots are the only two teams in the league to have made the playoffs each of the last five years, which. The Packers won the Super Bowl in 2010 and the Patriots have made at least the AFC Conference Championship game the last three years, losing the Super Bowl after the 2011 season.
There are many similarities between the two teams from the front office on down. Both teams have one guy in charge of football operations, the difference there is the Patriots head coach has final say as opposed to the general manager in Green Bay. But both of those guys, Bill Belichick and Ted Thompson, respectively, know exactly what they are doing and both are having great success.
The one thing that kind of stands in the face of all this success is that between the two teams they have only won one Super Bowl since the Patriots won two out of three from 2001 to 2004. That was the Packers victory over the Steelers following the 2010 season. Neither franchise has been able to achieve the kind of success that the man the Super Bowl trophy was named after, and that is win five championships in seven seasons, including three in a row.
Vince Lombardi is and probably always will be considered the greatest NFL coach of all time, but what coaches like Belichick and the Packers’ head coach Mike McCarthy are doing is certainly putting them in the ballpark. Last week McCarthy passed Lombardi for the second most wins as head coach in Packers’ history and Belichick has already rewritten the Patriots’ history.
Sunday’s game is a matchup of organizations as much as it for the teams on the field. Both have unbelievable leadership and consistency in the key positions along with full support of ownership, in the Packers’ case, all 360,000-plus.
I am liking this matchup for the Packers for this game. I’ll break that down Friday.