Before last Sunday, Green Bay Packers fans were still a bit of a skeptical bunch. The Packers needed a late fourth-quarter comeback to defeat the Arizona Cardinals in Week 7, and memories of a loss to the Cleveland Browns and a tie against the Dallas Cowboys were still lingering.
With those reasons still in mind, Packers fans were slow to believe that the team had turned a corner, responding to last week’s SB Nation Reacts survey with just a 64% positive confidence rating that the team was headed
in the right direction.
However, that all changed with last Sunday’s win over the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Packers dominated the second half, coming away with a ten-point victory and a defining game from Jordan Love in the process. That drove this week’s ratings way up, with 88% of survey responders now answering the confidence question in the positive.
NFC North Race
At the end of Week 8, the Packers remain in the lead for the NFC North, holding a half-game edge over the 5-2 Detroit Lions as well as a head-to-head win. The Chicago Bears remain in the picture at 4-3, with the Vikings back another game at 3-4 and seemingly fading fast.
Five of Green Bay’s divisional games will come over the final seven weeks of the season, including the rematch with the Lions on Thanksgiving Day. That setup gives them a great chance to control the race for the division down the stretch with a good record in those five contests. Still, the Lions loom and are the most immediate threat to the Packers’ lead.
This week, we asked Acme Packing Company readers whether they think the Packers will win the NFC North title this year. The votes came back with 72 percent saying that the Packers will take the division crown — that means that at least 16 percent of those surveyed think that the team is moving in the right direction, even while predicting that they will not win the division.
That discrepancy is understandable, however. After all, the Lions are an excellent team, and finishing second to them in the division would not necessarily be a lost season, even with the expectations that the Packers have established for themselves through eight weeks.
Defensive Player of the Year
On a broader front, the open Reacts surveys this week asked NFL fans of all teams to predict who would win various major awards at the end of the season. One of those awards had a Packer as an option — though it was not the Most Valuable Player award, which this writer thinks should have included Jordan Love as one of the choices.
Instead, it was the Defensive Player of the Year award, for which Micah Parsons is one of the leading candidates. However, despite currently being FanDuel sportsbook’s favorite for the award, Parsons finished second in fans’ voting, getting just under a quarter of the vote. Instead, it was Myles Garrett of the Cleveland Browns who took the top spot, doing so with a whopping 37 percent of the vote.
Parsons and Garrett each have a DPOY award to their name already, with Parsons winning in 2022 and Garrett earning the honor in 2023. Garrett does lead the NFL at present with 10 sacks, and five of those came in last week’s game against the New England Patriots. Perhaps recency bias and that gaudy number have fans focused on Garrett, but there are plenty of reasons to believe that Parsons can overtake Garrett.
For one, the Packers look like they are headed to the postseason one way or another, barring injury or major collapse. The Browns, well, not so much — they arguably have a better chance at earning the #1 overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft than a playoff spot at this point. It usually takes a truly transcendent season for a player on a non-playoff team to earn one of these major awards, though Garrett is certainly capable of that.
Still, don’t expect him to post five-sack games week in and week out. If the two players end up reasonably close on the stat sheet by the end of the year, Parsons should have a better case than Garrett based on their teams’ records, which may be why he currently has the best odds.
