Quote Originally Posted by hoosier View Post
Routine FG
40+with the severe crosswind is not routine. Notice what happened when the Pats kicker tried it in that end of the stadium.
Exactly. Gostkowski was 11/11 from 40-49 and 26/27 overall prior to the kick he missed. Crosby was 4/5 in a game the Packers won by 5 points. I'm not offering this as an excuse for Crosby, but an explanation of why the miss occurred. The snap was a bit high, Masthay stretched to catch it, got it down nicely, but timing is everything (especially late season in GB) and Crosby wasn't able to adjust well-enough. Three guys have to perform well in a FG, and on the miss two of them were a bit off, resulting in a narrow miss in tough conditions.

The kickoff out of bounds? Obviously he was asked to kick to the corner. The Packers do that quite often. When you do that, once in a while the ball will not bounce as you hope. It's a risk you take, and you have to live with the bad bounce occasionally. It is a football, after all, and no one can control how it will bounce all of the time, how far it will roll, etc. especially on kick offs.

If Crosby is a loser in this game, so is Nelson for not catching the throw from Rodgers that was behind him, (after all he is an NFL player and should make that catch, so what if it was deflected) and especially for not beating the coverage of Revis and Browner more often. If Crosby is expected to be perfect in what he does, so should Nelson regardless of who covers him. He should have been open more often.

For that matter, Rodgers is a loser for his errant throws early, especially a couple in the red zone, the poor throw to Nelson that Browner(?) deflected and for a couple sacks he could have thrown away, not to mention the one during which he exposed himself to significant injury and/or a fumble by not just going down and getting drilled to the turf instead. Mistakes from him shouldn't be tolerated either.