Wildcard route would have been better for Packers again

The Green Bay Packers might have waited too long to set themselves up for another run at the Super Bowl.

Losing at Kansas City was a step in the right direction, but it could be a case of too little too late.

The Packers had all season to position themselves as a favorite to win the championship, but until Sunday they had done nothing to solve their tricky dilemma of winning too many games - 13 in a row.

Missing out on an undefeated season is characterized as a big disappointment for the Packers, but anybody who understands how the playoffs work knows that the only thing that could have helped Green Bay more would have been a few losses before December.

An unblemished record makes good talk show fodder, but it would have been a detriment in the playoffs. A run at NFL history creates a big target and sets up the best team for the biggest fall, probably at the hands of a wildcard that barely crawled into the mix but now - as the media is fond of saying - "is starting to believe in itself."

The fall might still come. After all, Green Bay flirted with flawlessness. That's a mistake in today's NFL. Attempting to be flawless - even dominant - during the regular season can be a fatal flaw come the playoffs.

It's almost better to be a sixth seed with a chip on your shoulder and a happy-to-be-here approach - as the Packers were last season.

Wildcards come in loose, with nothing to lose and, after surviving a few tough games to get there, believe they are favored by destiny.

The regular-season alpha males, on the other hand, have played so well that they can start the playoffs weighed down by expectations and with the gnawing feeling that they may have peaked too soon.

In this era of parity, the NFL playoffs are about getting hot, healthy or lucky - or all three - at the right time. With each year that passes, the playoffs have less and less to do with identifying the strongest team.

The same pattern revealed itself in Major League Baseball, where the winningest clubs over last summer's long campaign were trumped during the postseason by the St. Louis (wild) Cards, who entered the playoffs with the eighth-best record in MLB. The year before, the World Series was won by the San Francisco Giants, who had the fifth-best record.

Fans of professional sports are accustomed to the playoffs reversing fortunes, but before the 2006 postseason, the NFL wasn't as kind to wildcards.

Before the Steelers - a sixth-seed - won Super Bowl XL, only three wildcard teams had won the previous 39 Super Bowls, the last being the 2000 Ravens.

But now... well, good luck predicting which team will get hot.

The Super Bowl-winning Colts lost four of their last seven regular-season games before sweeping through the playoffs in 2007.

The Giants won the Super Bowl in 2008 after finishing second in the NFC East with 10 wins. The Giants caught fire and ended the Patriots' quest for an undefeated season. But who remembers that Tom Coughlin's wildcards entered the playoffs after losing two or their last three?

The Arizona Cardinals - a surprise entry in the 2009 Super Bowl, where they lost to the Steelers - weren't wildcards, but after dropping four of their last six regular-season games to finish 9-7, they were dismissed as the most dismal of division winners.

No amount of analysis can explain why those Cardinals took wing. Or how the Giants put it together the year they beat the Patriots. And nobody has much of a clue this postseason which teams will surprise the experts.

The Packers, though, already are on shaky ground. They were due to stumble, and better that happen in December in Kansas City than in the playoffs.

But if they fail to reach the Super Bowl, it won't be any secret what led to their downfall.

The Packers could have put themselves in perfect position for another run at the Lombardi Trophy. But they blew it. They just didn't do enough to earn a coveted wildcard slot.