Week 13: Green Bay at Dallas

If you live near Green Bay, Wisc. or Dallas, Texas, you will be able to watch this game on regular television, and you should. If you don’t live in those places you are less likely 1) to have an outsized fondness for fried cheese curds/stupid-looking hats and 2) to have this game on your cable package. Unless you’re paying extra for NFL Network, that is. If you are, then you’ve probably already watched the network’s usual programming – those NFL Films team-recap documentaries with grandiose titles and faux-dramatic narration – so often that football games are meaningless to you. Hardcore NFL Network viewers generally just wander around their workplaces mumbling bits of narration from the ’06 Tampa Bay Bucs’ team doc, “Napping Towards the Offseason.” Do not make eye contact with these people.

But yeah: NFL Network isn’t in every cable package, so you might have to brave going to a bar (or grill; or bar and grill) for this one. Ordinarily, we’d say it’s not worth it – wallowing amid the desperate commingled stenches of hot wings and drunks in stained Troy Aikman jerseys is not cool – but if you’re still reading after that last parenthetical, this one is worth it. Incidentally, the NFL will not be criticized for airing its best game of the week on a night most people associate more with 30 Rock than football, and on a channel most people don’t know exists. Any other league would, but the NFL will just keep on making money. The league makes $5,000 every time we type out the letters “NFL,” actually. Even if they’re in a word like “influenza” or “enflamed.” Weird, right?

Much of what we just wrote is untrue, but instead of boring you with corrections… football? The Patriots remain remorselessly perfect, but the second-best records in the NFL belong to this pair of NFC teams, twin favorites to face Bill Belichick’s Really Incredibly Mean Machine in the Super Bowl. The Cowboys are second in the NFL in yards per game (388.5) and scoring (32.5 points per game); the Packers rank third and fifth (380.4 and 26.9), respectively. Green Bay is fifth in points-allowed (16.8) and twelfth in yards-allowed (315.4); Dallas is twelfth (20.1) and seventh (299.1), respectively. Both teams’ quarterbacks rank among the NFL’s most instantly recognizable players, with Tony Romo rising as an aw-shucks icon (despite spending a lot of time buying Patron shots for third-tier pop starlets at Dallas-area lounges) and Brett Favre continuing to be the last thing NFL broadcasters think of before they fall asleep. What we’re saying is, they’re pretty evenly matched.

Of late, too, both teams have looked excellent, although the thing with the NFL’s vaunted parity – an uncharitable observer might call it “a glut of mediocre teams” – is that it gives good teams ample opportunity to rough up weak ones. Of course the Cowboys looked great against the Jets on Thanksgiving: they were playing the Jets. The same can’t be said of the Packers’ Thanksgiving carving-up of the Lions – who are tougher than they look, if not quite as tough as they first seemed – but Green Bay has knocked down its share of tomato cans this season, too. Recently, though, the Packers have looked like the better club – and looked better, in fact, than anyone this side of Foxboro.

The Packers have posted four straight games of 30-plus points, with some of those huge games coming against some tough defenses. The rejuvenated Favre and his receivers have vaporized suspect secondaries – that would be Minnesota (last in the NFL in pass defense) and Detroit (31st) – but the Packers have also gotten great offensive line play and unearthed a tough runner in undrafted rookie RB Ryan Grant (4.6 YPC as a starter). The continued excellence from their reliably relentless defense helps a lot, too.

Dallas, of course, already had two good running backs and a fine defense. As we said, these teams are pretty evenly matched, and we’re (obviously) hard-pressed to make a coherent argument for one over the other. The numbers say it’s a wash. The TV listings say it’s on channel 600-something, up with the TV stations that play Latin music. And despite the fact that the Cowboys are 1) very good and 2) very good at home, something is telling us the hotter-seeming Packers will pull this one out. Even on the off chance that it’s leftover narration from NFL Films’ team doc about the 2005 Packers (“Wandering Dazedly Into the Offseason”), we’re going to listen.

Packers by 2