In February, the Los Angeles Rams won the Super Bowl, now the defending champion must win twice to avoid a historic negative record. It's all because Green Bay Packers star quarterback Aaron Rodgers can win even after his bedtime in the freezing cold.
The Green Bay Packers kept their own playoff hopes alive and finally sealed the end of the defending champion Los Angeles Rams. With the 24:12 on Monday night, the Packers can still hope to climb to a wildcard rank with three remaining NFL game days with six wins and eight losses.
The team around Aaron Rodgers needs a lot of support from other teams and can't afford any more mistakes. The Rams, on the other hand, have no mathematical chance after their tenth defeat of the season and end the season after the main round at the beginning of January. In the year after winning the Super Bowl, only the Denver Broncos have suffered as many bankruptcies.
Rodgers got 22 of his 30 throws to a teammate at minus nine degrees and had a touchdown pass and an interception. With the win over the Rams, Rodgers has now won nine "Monday Night Football" games in a row as a starting quarterback, only Kenny Stabler had a longer series from 1975 to 1980 with eleven wins. The veteran commented calmly on his run: "When you're a young player, you dream of playing on Monday night," said Rodgers, who turned 39 earlier this month. "If you're an older player, you want the midday games. So it's already after my bedtime. I'm ready to go home and go to bed."
The mood in the Rams is completely different: With ten defeats from the first 14 games, the team produced the worst record of a Super Bowl titleholder ever. "This has been a real struggle in a lot of ways, a lot of adversity that we've been through," said Rams coach Sean McVay. "But I think what we've seen from our guys is that they're going to keep fighting. They're going to finish those last three games in the right way, with the right attitude and mentality and we're going to get the best of it to the best of our abilities, that's all I can do and I have faith that we will do just that together as a group.
