When the 2022 schedule was released, Cowboys Nation circled Nov. 13 in bright red permanent marker. Mike McCarthy’s return to Lambeau Field and his first time facing the squad he took to a Super Bowl looked like it would also be a clash of NFC heavyweights as the historic rivals jockeyed for an early head-to-head edge with postseason seedings on their minds.
Fate has dealt the Packers a different hand, though, and Green Bay comes in to the highly-anticipated Week 10 matchup riding a five-game losing streak and desperately needing a victory to turn their season around.
Going up against Aaron Rodgers was always going to be tough. But going up against a cornered Rodgers out to prove he and his Green Bay teammates are still a force to be reckoned with might actually make for an even stiffer challenge for the Cowboys defense this Sunday afternoon on the not-yet-frozen tundra.
Forget the seven interceptions he’s tossed through nine games and that that’s more than he’s thrown in any entire season since 2016. Never mind that he hasn’t recorded a 300-yard passing game since last December. He’s still a ten-time Pro Bowler and the reigning league MVP (two years running).
This just in: he’s still Aaron Rodgers.
“We have to be very sound,” Cowboys safety Jayron Kearse told reporters this week. “A-Rod’s one of the best quarterbacks to ever play this game. He does a lot of things well: he can manipulate the defense, he can rip it from the pocket if you keep him in the pocket, or if you want to flush him out of the pocket, he’s good outside the pocket making throws on the run, just being in sync with those guys at receiver where they’re able to make those extended plays.”
Fellow Dallas safety Malik Hooker agrees. He knows that the Packers’ current 3-6 record doesn’t mean much… and it won’t mean a thing come kickoff.
“I’m sure everybody on this team has a high level of respect for Aaron Rodgers and the way that he’s played ball throughout his career,” Hooker said at his locker Monday. “They’ve lost a couple games down the road coming in here, but that’s nothing to look at. They’re not a bad football team, they have talent, they have good players. We’ve just got to go out there and keep playing ball the way we know how to play and not try to take this one lightly.”
Hooker, who sat out the team’s Week 8 win over Chicago with a hamstring injury, expects to be back in action as the Cowboys defense hopes to take advantage of an uncharacteristically-inaccurate Rodgers, who threw three picks this past weekend to Detroit.
Dallas has seven interceptions on the year. Hooker has one; Kearse is still waiting to notch his first and knows that a statement win over Green Bay- even a temporarily reeling Packers squad- would be big for Dallas as they enter a tough stretch of games to start the back half of the season.
“You want to go up against these guys, and you want to win these types of games,” Kearse said. “It gives you a huge, huge momentum boost, confidence boost, to where [if] you go out there and you beat a guy like Aaron Rodgers, the sky’s the limit.”
The team has already figured out that this game means slightly more to Mike McCarthy, even though he would prefer to maintain that it doesn’t.
The Cowboys head coach admits he spent some time talking with his players about his 12-plus-year tenure in Green Bay and the Super Bowl XLV win he earned with Rodgers at the helm.
“I don’t think I’d have been doing my job if I didn’t address it,” McCarthy said in a press conference to start the week.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing Aaron. We’ve had great communication. I have nothing but love and gratitude for him,” McCarthy continued. “Just a whole lot of appreciation, not only him, but players, the team that we had there. We had some great times, great moments. When I think of him, I think of the one-on-one conversations we used to have, especially in the younger days, and it always ended with a hug and ‘I love ya.’ So that’s what I think about our relationship. I think he made me a much better coach. You’re talking about a man that’s one of the premier professional athletes of his generation. I spent the weekend watching him play; he’s playing at an extremely high level. Just the fundamentals and just the way he plays, he deserves all the accolades that he receives. I’m looking forward to seeing him.”
But now McCarthy will be seeing him from the opposite sideline. Rodgers may still be wearing the familiar green and gold, but McCarthy will have just come out of a place he doesn’t have much history with: the visitor’s locker room at Lambeau Field.
Kearse, however, has been in enemy colors at Lambeau four times as a Viking. His Minnesota team came away from those meetings with one tie and three losses.
Though not in the same division, the Cowboys have history of their own at the storied stadium, iconic moments that include the Ice Bowl and the “Dez Caught It” game (which McCarthy won).
So Kearse, like every Cowboys player, is well aware of what this game really means: to the Packers and their season, to the Cowboys and their quest to rise to the top of the conference, and to Mike McCarthy and his bid to notch his first win as a visitor at the building that sits at the end of a street named for him.
But sure, this one is just another game.
“It’s always tough in Lambeau,” Kearse offered. “This one, for us, thinking back to the rivalry, we’re not really thinking much about that. We want to win this one for our head coach.”
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