What a difference a week makes.
Heading into last Sunday’s game against the Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers fans were still pretty down about their team. Despite a win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers the week before, Cheeseheads still overwhelmingly expected the team to finish under .500 in the division and confidence in the team’s overall direction hovered at around 25 percent.
Beating your biggest and oldest rivals in a blowout fixes a lot of concerns, however, and that’s exactly what the Packers
did with a 31-7 shellacking of Ben Johnson’s crew. As a result, fan sentiment has bounced back dramatically, starting with expectations for the team to make the postseason now that they are sitting at 3-2 and squarely in the playoff hunt in the NFC.
With Green Bay currently holding the #5 seed in the far-too-early NFC playoff picture, we at Acme Packing Company felt it time to take the temperature of our readers on their level of playoff expectations. Sportsbooks like FanDuel still think it’s less than a 50/50 shot for the Packers to make the postseason — that book has Green Bay’s odds at +156 — but Packers fans, at least, have a much more optimistic view of the team now that they have a dominant win on the books.
That’s right, a full two-thirds of those who responded to our survey say they think the Packers will be playing meaningful football past Week 18:
Interestingly, however, there is a small group of fans who are not confident in the team’s overall direction despite thinking that they will be a playoff team. Our confidence index sits at just 59%, up massively from the 24% rating a week ago but still lagging behind the playoff expectations.
If you’re one of those who expect a playoff berth but still aren’t confident in the team’s direction, we want to know why. Is it simply a matter of expectations? Are you defining “the right direction” as requiring the team to land a top seed and be a top-level Super Bowl contender? Or is it something else?
Please let us know in the comments if you’re one of those fans and what your thought process was in voting that way.
