Six years ago, the Green Bay Packers had the Seattle Seahawks staggering around CenturyLink Field in the NFC Championship Game, needing just one final jab to knock out the defending champs and punch their ticket to the Super Bowl.
An unforgettable collapse, featuring as many as 21 missed opportunities, allowed the Seahawks to come back and stun the Packers in overtime.
The script was flipped during Sunday’s NFC Championship Game at Lambeau Field. The Packers were left doing the staggering, the result of self-inflicted errors, but a chance to repeat the Seahawks’ escape act vanished thanks to a familiar antagonist: missed opportunities.
“We had our chances,” quarterback Aaron Rodgers said.
The autopsy of this latest NFC Championship Game disappointment reads a lot like the one from Seattle. Missed opportunities always have consequences.
The Packers made critical mistakes and then missed all their major chances to overcome them.
Here are all the misses, all the botched chances, and all the bungled plays that created the framework for a meltdown and eventually cost the Packers a trip to Super Bowl LV: