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“If you look at the film and look at the way we can be, I think we’re a lot better than the way we’re portrayed or the way it looks,” Barnett said Wednesday. “I’ll tell you if we’re bad. But we’re nowhere near that bad.”
Barnett isn’t alone in that assertion.
“We see it on tape and we know we’re actually much better than what the numbers show at stopping the run,” defensive tackle Ryan Pickett said. “We stop it most of the time and then we give up a big run. We know that we can play the run, we have played it. It’s just that right now we’re just on different pages. We’re just not playing the best we can play against the run. We’re excited. We know we’re going to get better.”
The numbers suggest otherwise.
Entering next Sunday’s game against the Minnesota Vikings and running back Adrian Peterson at the Metrodome, the Packers rank 27th in the 32-team NFL in rushing yards allowed per game (146.4) and 30th in rushing yards allowed per carry (4.9).
In five of their eight games so far, the Packers have allowed 175 or more total rushing yards: to Minnesota (187), Dallas (217), Tampa Bay (178), Atlanta (176) and Tennessee (178).
After the Packers’ loss to the Titans last Sunday, Tennessee coach Jeff Fisher said the Packers’ ranking against the run was “so misleading. We’ve looked at four of five (of their) games this year and you just don’t see it.”
“That’s why I stay awake at night,” defensive coordinator Bob Sanders said. “The margin of error is not real wide with the backs we play in this league week-in and week-out.”
The Packers argue their ranking is because of the number of big runs they’ve allowed, and there is some truth to that.
So far this season, the Packers have allowed big runs to Peterson (34 yards), Dallas’ Marion Barber (25 yards) and Felix Jones (60-yard touchdown), Tampa Bay’s Earnest Graham (47 yards), Atlanta’s Michael Turner (22 yards) and Tennessee’s LenDale White (54 yards). Seattle’s Julius Jones also had a 51-yard run wiped out by a questionable holding call on ex-Packers guard Mike Wahle.
“That’s what’s killing us. The big play has been killing us,” Pickett said. “If you look back at every game that we’ve given up a lot of rushing yards and there’s normally one big run that pretty much killed us. We play great 90 percent of the time and then the 10 percent we don’t, they make us pay for it. We’ve got to stop that. We’ve got to play great 100 percent of the time.”
That’s especially true this week against Peterson, who had 103 yards in the regular-season opener and ranks second in the NFL with 823 yards on 176 attempts (4.7-yard average).
“It’s hard to stop him. I don’t know if anybody can just really stop him,” Pickett said. “You’ve got to play focused and sound football. You’ve got to stay in your gaps. Because he’ll make you pay. I mean, he has vision that’s out of this world. He plays like he’s been in the NFL for about 10 years already, just the way he sees blocks and cuts upfield. He’s special.”
