The NFL couldn’t have asked for a more star-studded championship weekend.
In a sport now dominated by passing, the NFC and AFC championship games will showcase four of the NFL’s elite quarterbacks: Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen.
In the AFC Championship Game, Bills gunslinger Allen, who just turned in an MVP-caliber season, will try to stun the defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium.
But in this post, we’ll focus on the NFC Championship Game, a showdown for the ages between Brady and Rodgers, which will be played up on the Frozen Tundra in Green Bay!
Tampa Bay (+3.5) at Green Bay, 3:05 p.m. ET Sunday
Forty-three-year-old Brady, chasing his 10th Super Bowl appearance, will make his 14th start in a conference championship game, an astonishing figure and twice as many as No. 2 Joe Montana.
The dude on the other side, Rodgers, is no slouch himself, appearing in the NFC Championship Game for a fifth time and in search of his second Super Bowl appearance — and first since beating Pittsburgh in Super Bowl XLV 10 years ago.
Tampa Bay went 11-5, finished a game behind New Orleans in the NFC South, dispatched the Washington Football Team on Super Wild Card Weekend, then avenged two regular-season losses to the Saints by (probably) sending Drew Brees into retirement last Sunday at the Superdome.
Meanwhile, Green Bay went 13-3, coasted in the putrid NFC North and secured a first-round bye. In the Divisional Round, the Packers downed the Los Angeles Rams 32-18 at Lambeau Field. The Packers will now look to avenge a 38-10 loss to the Buccaneers back in Week 6 in Tampa.
Can anyone slow down the Packers right now?
The Packers are on fire. Green Bay has won seven games in a row and features the NFL’s No. 1 offense by a wide margin according to Football Outsiders’ DVOA metric. The Packers have the league’s best passing attack and the fifth-best rushing attack. If there’s any room to nitpick, Green Bay faced just the 22nd-toughest slate of opposing defenses (thanks again, NFC North).
Green Bay’s weakness though is on the defensive side of the ball, where the Packers rank 17th in DVOA. Green Bay is a middle-of-the-road team against both the pass (15th) and the run (18th), and the Packers played a league-average slate of opposing offenses.
Rodgers is the likely MVP winner after turning in an absurd season in which he completed more than 70% of his passes and threw for 4,299 yards and a league-best 48 touchdowns against just five interceptions, the lowest figure of any full-time starter.
Rodgers’ favorite target Davante Adams is the NFL’s premier wide receiver right now. He hauled in 115 passes for 1,374 yards and a league-best 18 TDs in just 14 games.
Can the Buccaneers survive a third-straight week on the road?
The Buccaneers are looking to become only the fifth team to win three-straight road playoff games. Coincidentally, the last team to do it was the 2010 Packers en route to their Super Bowl XLV win.
The silver lining for Tampa though is that if the Buccaneers can survive the trip to Lambeau, they’ll become the first team in NFL history to play a Super Bowl in their home stadium, as Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium is lined up to host Super Bowl LV.
The Buccaneers are a balanced club that can outscore you or do it with defense. Tampa is No. 2 in Football Outsiders’ overall DVOA metric, just behind the Saints team it sent packing last week. The Bucs are third in offensive DVOA and fifth in defensive DVOA. The Buccaneers’ five losses all came against teams that made the playoffs (Saints twice, Chiefs, Rams and Bears).
When the Packers have the ball
Green Bay is second only to Buffalo in passing success rate and fifth in passing explosiveness, according to sharpfootballstats.com. If that’s not scary enough, the Packers also have an elite running back in the diminutive Aaron Jones, who was fourth in the NFL with 1,104 rushing yards and is also a weapon in the passing game.
The Packers are dynamite in pass protection, allowing pressures on only 14.2% of dropbacks in the regular season, the best mark in the NFL. However, Green Bay played 10 games against opponents that ranked 21st or worse in pressure rate and just three games against teams that ranked in the top 12 in that category.
In Week 6, the Buccaneers, who had the NFL’s third-best pressure rate in the regular season, sacked Rodgers five times, intercepted him twice and held him to a minuscule 2.7 yards per pass — one of the worst games of Rodgers’ career. Although it’s hard to imagine Tampa duplicating that effort here, the Packers will have to hold the fort without franchise left tackle David Bakhtiari.
Tampa Bay has the fifth-best pass defense and best rush defense according to DVOA, and the Buccaneers have been tested by a top-10 slate of opposing offenses. One area of concern for Tampa is that the Bucs have been just 23rd against rushing success rate since Week 10, a sign that Jones could have his opportunities to chip away. Tampa does get some help from the return of gigantic nose tackle Vita Vea. A first-round pick in 2019, Vea hasn’t played since breaking his leg while tackling the Bears’ David Montgomery in Week 5.
When the Buccaneers have the ball
The Buccaneers have the NFL’s fifth-best passing offense and 10th-best rushing offense by DVOA and should be able to find success on the ground or through the air against a middling Packers D.
It’s important to note that in the four games in which Brady faced a top-10 team in defensive DVOA, he was 0-4 with five TDs and seven interceptions. In all other games, he was 11-1 with 35 TDs and just seven interceptions. Those staggering splits should spell good news against the Packers’ mediocre D and weak pass rush (26th in pressure rate).
Despite having an efficient ground attack in the regular season, the running game wasn’t a priority for the Buccaneers as they ranked 28th in rushing attempts per game (just 23 per game). But Tampa has reaffirmed its commitment to the run in the playoffs, running 29 times against Washington and 35 against the Saints.
A ball-control mentality will be vital in this game for two reasons: 1. One of the best ways to stop Rodgers is to keep him on the sideline and 2. The Packers love to play six defensive backs, so a way to counter that is to try and run them over.
Leonard Fournette was mostly used as a third-down back in the regular season but has been given an increased role in the playoffs, posting 269 yards from scrimmage and two TDs. Ronald Jones II is Tampa’s best runner though, averaging 5.1 yards per carry and tallying 978 rushing yards in the regular season.
Veteran receiver Antonio Brown will miss the game with a knee injury, but Tampa has a deep group of receivers thanks to Mike Evans, Chris Godwin and even deep threat Scotty Miller. Don’t be surprised to see elite Packers corner Jaire Alexander glued to Evans for much of the game.
The bottom line
When we ran every point spread for the 2020 season through Excel’s Solver, we came out with a power rating of -4.8 for Tampa Bay and -4.5 for Green Bay, meaning the two teams would be favored by 4.8 and 4.5 points, respectively, vs. a league-average opponent on a neutral field.
It’s not a perfect method, because it ignores how teams changed throughout the season, injuries and current form, but it gets you in the ballpark. And when you pit these two teams against each other, you’re looking at roughly a pick ’em on a neutral field.
So it comes down to how you value home-field advantage. In a normal situation, with a packed house at Lambeau Field, fans dressed head to toe in hunting gear and lubed up with Spotted Cow, you could argue it’s worth 4-5 points. But thanks to COVID-19, you’ll be looking at a crowd on par with a Texas 6A high school game — with worse weather, of course.
Home-field advantage in the NFL has been on the decline for years, but thanks to the pandemic, it completely cratered in 2020, as home teams went 127-128-1 straight-up, with a slightly negative point differential. (NFL ratings guru Jeff Sagarin makes home field worth about one-third of a point.)
The Buccaneers should have no problem moving the ball against Green Bay’s defense, and on the other side of the ball, Tampa is able to do the one thing — generate pressure — that can make Rodgers look like an actual human being instead of the alien that he is. Those factors should give Tampa a chance to stay in the game.
Three is the most important number in football. Games land on that margin at almost twice the clip of the second-most common number, seven points. Even though fading Rodgers in this spot feels like a death wish, the math is the math. Since we make this game closer to a coin flip, we’ll take the points with the dog.
- The Pick: Buccaneers +3.5
