Green Bay Packers: 4 Matchups to Watch in the Divisional Round
By Kenny Jilek
The Green Bay Packers have home-field advantage through the NFC Championship Game, and this week the San Francisco 49ers come to Lambeau. There’s some history between these two teams and still an open wound from the destruction that was the 2019 NFC Championship game.
The Packers have a chance to finally exorcise those demons completely after beating the 49ers in back-to-back years of regular-season matchups. To do this, they’ll have to win some very crucial matchups.
The 49ers struggled at times this season, especially with starting quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, but they just knocked off the number three seeded Cowboys and still have plenty of playmakers on both sides of the ball. Minimizing those players’ impact and getting winning efforts from their own stars is key to victory. Football is and always has been a team game of many different matchups each play, and that will decide the outcome Saturday night.
Green Bay Packers Matchup #1: David Bakhtiari vs. Nick Bosa
When these two teams faced off in week one, Bakhtiari was nowhere close to coming back and Yosh Nijman made the first start of his NFL career. This led to Green Bay using tight ends and running backs to help chip Bosa and slow him down on the pass rush. This strategy can hurt the passing game having one guy out on a route slower, but it did lead to this fantastic block when Robert Tonyan absolutely buried Bosa.
That was fun to remember, wasn’t it? Well, it will be interesting to see how the Green Bay Packers choose to handle Bosa this time around. Bakhtiari is one of the best tackles in the game, so he shouldn’t need much help, but he has only played about one-half of real football this year.
Bosa is one of the best pass rushers in the league and compiled 15.5 sacks over the course of this season. However, the other part of this story is his health status. He suffered a concussion in the Wild Card round that could keep him out for Saturday, but head coach Kyle Shanahan said the team is “pretty optimistic” about him being cleared. Without him, the 49ers pass rush takes a big hit, though not a knockout punch, as they still have other talented defensive linemen.
This is a big storyline for both teams this week, with some sort of health concern for both superstars that could turn the tide of the game.