Green Bay Packers

One might say (if one were a cynic) that the Green Bay Packers have no right to be as good as they have been over the past century since they were founded in 1919. Some might even question how the team still exists at all, hailing as it does from the third-most populous city in America’s twentieth-most populous state. Remarkably, the Packers’ historic stadium Lambeau Field, the oldest active NFL stadium and third-oldest professional sports venue in the USA after Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field, seats over 80,000 fans in a city with just north of 100,000 inhabitants. The fact that the team still sells the venue out on a regular basis speaks to both the success and appeal of the Packers as a franchise and the passion for football as a sport across Wisconsin. Named after a meat-packing company (the original workplace of stadium namesake Richie Lambeau, who started the Packers, played for the team, and later coached them), the Packers were contenders right from the start, bagging eleven NFL championships in the decades prior to the 1970 AFL-NFL merger. The last two of these triumphs occurred in Super Bowl I (1966) and Super Bowl II (1967), with the Green and Gold defeating the Dallas Cowboys on both occasions, igniting a decades-long rivalry between this pair of dominant NFL teams. The Packers struggled, however, until the early 1990s, when they were led back into the playoffs by Hall of Famer Brett Favre, one of the greatest NFL quarterbacks of all time. The Cowboys knocked them out in three seasons in a row (twice in Divisional Playoffs and once in the NFC Championship), but in 1996 “the Pack” finally broke through and appeared in their first Super Bowl in nearly 30 years. With Favre throwing an 81-yard touchdown pass (a Super Bowl record at the time) and Desmond Howard returning a kickoff 99 yards for a touchdown (another Super Bowl record at the time), the Packers proved too strong for the New England Patriots, winning Super Bowl XXXI by a comfortable margin of 35-21. They tried for a repeat in 1997 at Super Bowl XXXII, but were defeated 31-24 by John Elway’s Denver Broncos in a memorable showdown between two of the sport’s most legendary quarterbacks. The Packers would remain playoff contenders in the years to come, riding quarterback Aaron Rodgers’s Super Bowl MVP performance to a fourth championship title in 2011, when the Green and Gold out-steeled the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25 to win Super Bowl XLV. Uncharacteristically, the Packers struggled in 2022 and missed the playoffs, and their 2023 form so far has been indifferent, but anyone who knows anything about football will never doubt for a second that the Pack will be back!