Packer Central

Packers Embrace Cold for Playoff Showdown vs. 49ers

It's going to cold on Saturday. Just how cold? And what about a potential NFC Championship Game for next weekend?

Bill Huber

GREEN BAY, Wis. – The weather forecast for Saturday night’s playoff game at Lambeau Field is clearing up.

“Clearing up” being the key words, and that’s good news for the Green Bay Packers as they get ready to host the San Francisco 49ers.

The Green Bay area is in the middle of a cold snap – it was minus-8 on Friday morning – but it will warm up to 20 on a cloudy Saturday. According to WBAY-TV’s Steve Beylon, the skies will be clearing up in the evening. Clear skies allow heat to escape, and that will lead to a cold evening.

Beylon is predicting a kickoff temperature of 12 with a wind chill near zero. Those figures will drop as the game progresses.

The weather isn’t going to win the game. The 49ers knocked out the Packers in the 2013 playoffs when it was 5 with a minus-10 wind chill. However, there is an advantage. The edge for the Packers is their ability to practice in cold weather and simply deal with it in their day-to-day lives. On Tuesday, Davante Adams practiced in shorts. The receivers and backs caught passes from Aaron Rodgers. There were the daily ball-security drills in which coaches poke at the ball being held by cold hands.

In the Packers’ one true cold-weather game this season, they routed the Vikings 37-10 with a kickoff temperature of 11.

“It’s something impressive. I give so much credit to the guys,” offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett said this week. “They love it, they embrace it. Once you’re here, once you live here, once you’re here as long as we are, it’s just something that you kind of get used to. Some people [on the Zoom call] are nodding their heads right now saying you can never really get used to it, but I will tell you after coming from Florida, it took me about three years, but it’s definitely a little bit easier to handle after the amount of time that I’ve been here. It’s a ton of credit for those guys, just watching Aaron throw the ball, watching the guys be able to catch it, even hitting and stuff like that. So, it’s something that you’ve just go to grow accustomed to.”

Cold weather generally means imperfect footing. That’s an advantage to the guy with the ball. For years, Rodgers has noted that cold weather and a slick field tends to slow down the pass rush. It’s also an advantage to the players who can win with straight-line power.

“I think it’s definitely an advantage for us,” defensive tackle Kenny Clark explained in the accompanying video. “We play in it. It’s our environment, we’re here every day and it only strengthens us a team, coming out and practicing in it every day and playing in it all the time.”

When the 49ers practiced this week, it was about 65. It was more than 70 degrees colder when they woke up in Appleton on Friday.

“I’ll talk to some of the guys about it,” Niners coach Kyle Shanahan said after Thursday’s practice. “I think each person’s different. Me personally, it’s not about getting used to it. It’s about going out and doing it for three-and-a-half hours and getting your mind set that I can do this for three-and-a-half hours and focus on the game. I don’t think you go out and freeze the day before and think that your body’s going to be more used to it the next day. That’s me personally. But I’ll talk to our players here a little bit on the plane. We got a couple options on what we can do. We can go outside [for a walk-through on Friday or] we have plenty room in the hotel with the ballroom.”

If the Packers beat the 49ers, they’ll advance to a third consecutive NFC Championship Game and their second in a row at Lambeau Field.

Last year, the Packers lamented the lack of frigid weather for their loss to Tampa Bay. Playing in the early game last year, it was 29 at kickoff. The forecast for next Sunday? A seasonable 25 for a high, though it would be colder for the 5:40 p.m. kickoff.

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Bill Huber
BILL HUBER

Bill Huber, who has covered the Green Bay Packers since 2008, is the publisher of Packers On SI, a Sports Illustrated channel. E-mail: packwriter2002@yahoo.com History: Huber took over Packer Central in August 2019. Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillHuberNFL Background: Huber graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he played on the football team, in 1995. He worked in newspapers in Reedsburg, Wisconsin Dells and Shawano before working at The Green Bay News-Chronicle and Green Bay Press-Gazette from 1998 through 2008. With The News-Chronicle, he won several awards for his commentaries and page design. In 2008, he took over as editor of Packer Report Magazine, which was founded by Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke, and PackerReport.com. In 2019, he took over the new Sports Illustrated site Packer Central, which he has grown into one of the largest sites in the Sports Illustrated Media Group.

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