Green Bay Packers: 5 Telling NFC Championship Stats from PFF

I really thought that this was the Green Bay Packers’ year. They had the NFL’s most productive offense, the MVP under center, the defense was peaking at the right time, and as a team, they were just clicking. However, it wasn’t mean to be. Ultimately, there were just too many mistakes to overcome.

I’ve already put out a few articles taking a look back at this game — sorry — but I wanted to do one more now that Pro Football Focus ($) has released their numbers from the game. PFF does an excellent job of logging incredibly detailed stats from each player of each NFL team every single week. I combed through those numbers from the Packers and Buccaneers NFC Championship Game and found five that tell the entire story of the game.

So why wait around? If you’re up for it, let’s take a look at what went wrong.

No pressure on Brady

I talked about this quite a bit leading up to the game; pressuring Tom Brady was going to be crucial to the Green Bay Packers’ success. They were unable to do this in Week 6, and unfortunately, they were unable to do it on Sunday.

When it was all said and done, the Packers finished with only five pressures on 37 dropbacks. That’s a pressure rate of just 13.5 percent, and only one of those pressure turned into a sack. Although I will point out that a pressure created by Darnell Savage blitzing did turn into a Jaire Alexander interception.

But overall, Brady had too much time in the pocket, and this really came back to bite the Packers on third downs. Tampa finished the game converting nine of their 14 attempts, including six of their first seven.