How Mason Crosby Made Me Eat Shit

Let there be absolutely no doubt that I was slightly offended this morning by Bill Johnson.

Let there be absolutely no doubt that I was slightly offended this morning by Bill Johnson on Green and Gold Today.

I vehemently disagreed with his take that fans should shut up about the play calling and lack of success by the Packers in short yardage situations. More importantly, I was offended that for some reason he would think a guy like me wouldn't have enough common knowledge to make an educated decision on the state of affairs by the Green Bay Packers on the football field, when he made it abundantly clear he was unable to do so.

Then, as he proceeded to call me a wigger in a cleverly round about way, I got pissed enough to actually look into things in an effort to defend this verbal lashing at the hand of some F-List star on a show that we all know only has legs because of one Jason J Wilde.

Now, rest assured I wanted to include Wilde in this article after he once again took the high road when asked by Johnson, "Packers Lounge, that's one of your boy's right?" and then helped me out in classic Wilde fashion by responding, "John Kuhn is 9-10 on third down, I can tell you that." But, I'm going to let him slide because that's just what he does.

He's like a poor man's Aaron Nagler. It works for him.

Anyway, after donning my large clock necklace and turning my hat backwards, I proceeded to dig into the Packers woes in short yardage situations. Most importantly, into their efforts on the goal line as bemoaned by so many Packer fans including me.

I started by going through every drive at the NFL's drive chart game by game. I started in reverse order and by the time I got through the New England game, the Packers had been terrible. It seemed like nearly every down-and-one resulted in a sack, a fumble, or some form of poor execution by the Packers.

Now this would certainly defend the opinion that all the blame can't be rested on Mike McCarthy, but fundamentals do reflect on coaching to some extent. However, my beef with McCarthy has never been on play calling, but rather on motivation and discipline, so I hadn't really disagreed with Johnson on that front. If you want to truly rip on someone for straying from the called game plan, rip on Rodgers.

Anyway, the bottom line for me was proving that turbo douche Johnson really had no stats to back up his attack on the fans, and the drive re-caps really didn't help his cause at all. So I knew I had his dumb ass right then and there, but I felt I needed one more set of stats to really make a firm, poignant, and intelligent argument in my favor.

I figured that the icing on the cake would be in the stats of Mason Crosby. I immediately went to see how many field goals he had attempted inside the 12 yard line, and more importantly inside the five. Once again I was right, there were a ton of them. Mason had attempted nine, yes you heard me nine, field goals inside the 10. Of those nine, four were inside the five yard line. That's nearly 36 points we gave up this season to play inside the goal line.

Then Crosby fucked me.

Next to his stats was this little link to compare Mason's numbers against the numbers of the other kickers in the league.

I never should have clicked it.

Mason Crosby rates 12th on the list when it comes to attempts inside the 12. If you include his miss, he ranks 17th. On that list of 11 guys ahead of Mason 7 of the 11 teams are playoff bound, making the Packers ratio of touchdowns to field goal average at best. In fact, they appear to be doing a lot better most of the teams currently seeded higher than them in the playoffs.

This in mind, I have to admit, I don't think you can make the argument that the Packers are any better or worse off than any other NFL team scoring touchdowns inside the ten or in short yardage goal line situations.

Naturally, I imagine these short, critical plays are perhaps burned into the minds of Packer perhaps a little more than they should be, but either way, it seems the Packers don't have it that bad after all.

So, I was wrong and I subsequently bow down to Bill Johnson.

He was right.

Yet sadly for Packer fans, in the end, I am still the only one of the bunch that could actually figure out why.

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Comments (7)

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Richard B's picture

January 03, 2011 at 12:59 pm

Well which is it? Did Mason make you eat shit or did he fuck you. Seems to me that there is a difference. Good points by the way.

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Packnic's picture

January 03, 2011 at 01:19 pm

Two Bloggers, One Cup.

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Alex Tallitsch's picture

January 03, 2011 at 04:59 pm

Dude...

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Chris's picture

January 03, 2011 at 01:01 pm

Funny and insightful -- well played, my man!

Humility is always cool, especially when packaged in this manner.

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MLecl0001's picture

January 03, 2011 at 06:37 pm

In one of the recent games, I think the Giants game the TV guys brought up the fact that the Packers were the best in redzone conversions in TDs. Dont know if it still holds true, but it surprised me.

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SpiderPack's picture

January 03, 2011 at 08:19 pm

Nice write-up Alex. Bill Johnson wreaks of so much ignorance it is very difficult for me to listen to Green & Gold. Its as though I'm forced to listen to an arrogant, angry 17yr old cover/discuss Packers issues. I understand that heated, discursive conversation sells as shown by the idiot talking heads at the major network sports-desks, but Johnson is terrible. He seems to miss the true point of nearly everything and focuses on creating conflict. He needs to be bitch-slapped on a regular basis. Today I had to turn the podcast off when he started in on ya.

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globalpack's picture

January 05, 2011 at 12:35 am

Nice post man. Fun and informative as always.

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