Aaron Rodgers' playoff mastery can upstage even the Giants' soap opera - Sporting News

Aaron Rodgers was the story that refused to get overshadowed. 

He was bigger than the cold. Bigger than the boat ride. Bigger than the drops. Bigger than the overthrows. Bigger than stepping out of bounds on kickoffs, and forgetting to pick up fumbles, and screwing up on fourth-and-1. Most of all, he was bigger than his absent security-blanket receiver.

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This is who Rodgers has been for seven weeks now, all Packers wins, including one in the NFC wild-card game over the Giants on Sunday night. He’s just eclipsed everything around him. This one brilliant performance is just a microcosm of this whole stretch of “running the table.’’

It makes it hard to wait all the way until next week, when he tests the Cowboys in Arlington, to see if he can keep being the irresistible force, no matter how immovable the object is.

The more Rodgers carved apart one of the very best defenses in the NFL and willed the Packers to win, the more he left all the other drama of this game in the background. Well, it didn’t really stay in the background. There was no way the 38-13 blowout was not going to revolve around the Giants players’ off-day Miami junket, one way or another.

But everything else had to fall back once Rodgers commanded center stage. Everything and everyone else looked inadequate. 

Did Odell Beckham Jr. have a bad case of the drops? Did Eli Manning count on miraculous saves of bad throws once too often? Was a wind-chill of minus-2 too much to ask offenses to fight through? Can you win when you don’t have Jordy Nelson for three quarters?

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Are ill-advised fourth-down calls in your own territory that give the other team momentum too much to overcome in a tight game? Is what seems like such a lucky play, an end-of-the-half Hail Mary, enough to get you by?

Rodgers made none of that matter. And then he played it down afterward.

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“We just did a good job of changing the face of some stuff we were trying to do,’’ he said of a 362-yard, four-touchdown, no-turnover performance. “And obviously, I was playing better in the third and fourth quarter than I was in the first quarter.’’

Better, at times, than anyone throwing a football right now, although Tom Brady surely will give him a run next weekend.

This was the most-anticipated wild-card game of this weekend, and the Packers couldn’t move the ball for more than a quarter. They trailed 6-0, and Nelson was knocked out of the game … and suddenly, the Giants had no chance, completely helpless in nearly every way.

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Everything was perfect. The play where Rodgers stayed alive for eight seconds before whistling it to Davante Adams in the end zone for their first touchdown, late in the first half. The Hail Mary, of course, which descended from on high right into the hands of Randall Cobb in the back of the end zone. 

Then, in the second half, there were the three in a row to Jared Cook, Adams and Cobb that covered 63 yards, ended with a touchdown, and followed that failed fourth-and-1. Then, the one Cobb reached up and snagged in the middle of the end zone in the fourth. 

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Plus all the ones in between, that looked as dead on-point as handoffs, as opposed to the ones Manning threw that everyone had been spoiled enough to think Beckham and Co. would always reel in, but often didn't this time.

Rodgers was a machine, even with all those missing parts. Everything he did in the Packers’ mad dash to the playoffs — 15 touchdowns, zero interceptions — he did when the stakes jumped up again. 

The more Rodgers did it, the more he made everything else irrelevant. Of all the great things he does, he does that best.

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