With all the talk about their former franchise player, Brett Favre, spinning the turbines in the NFL newsreel, the Green Bay Packers are getting lost in the shuffle. Minnesota, Detroit and Chicago have all stolen the spotlight with draft picks, Brett Favre drama and Jay Cutler news. However, it’s the Packers who are my leading pick to emerge from the NFC North…and not just because they’re a better team.

No other team in the league had worse luck than the Packers (note: piss off Detroit. Your team sucked. That’s not luck. That’s skill. It takes skill to suck as hard as you guys did last year.). The Packers finished a dismal 6-10 SU and 7-8-1 ATS with a pretty solid team. In most cases, that accounts to bad coaching or poor player execution. The funny thing in Green Bay is that they achieved that record in spite of a solid effort.

Green Bay finished eighth in the NFL with 5,695 total yards of offense, fifth overall in scoring with 26.2 points per game and 419 total points. Defensively, they ranked in the high-twenties with 380 total points scored against, averaging out to 23.8 points per game. Even with a 22-point blowout against the Saints in Week 12, the Packers averaged a point differential of -6.3 in their 10 losses last season. That was the lowest loss differential in the league. When you see that they had a top-5 offense, the Packers faced more bad luck than any other elite team in the NFL.

Entering the 2009-10 season, so many questions surround the suddenly competitive NFC North division. But none are more relevant to the NFL’s sphere of conversation than the fate of the Green Bay Packers who have 15 guys entering contract years.

In most situations, when money is on the line, it causes holdouts, disputes, mutiny and utter disaster for the NFL betting community. That’s not the case with Green Bay, a team that was built through the draft. Playing together for years reduces the chance for things to go sideways when a clubhouse is as tightly knit as the intimate Green Bay Packers.

Only Greg Jennings, Aaron Rodgers and Ryan Grant have received extensions, and financial security meaning that the locker room could conceivably be split in to two. In one camp stands the small handful of players who have secured contract extensions, while the other camp will comprise of the large majority of the room that doesn’t. But that’s the strange thing about professional sports…

In most cases players playing for a pay cheques play far better than those that don’t. Individual incentives could lead the Packers to go for broke, and salvage the disaster from last year in to playoff success. At +1400 to win the NFC, and +200 to win a division mired by failure for the past five years, the Packers will find themselves surging ahead of the rest as players up their game in hopes of landing big contracts.

Do not write off the Packers because of supposed in-house disputes. Aaron Rodgers and Greg Jennings will see to it that your betting dollars are secure, and defensive stalwarts like Nick Collison will see their free-agent value doesn’t dip by disappointing the Green Bay betting faithful again this season.


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