GREEN BAY – The loss was crushing, but given how the 2025 season went, it doesn't qualify as shocking.
The 31-27 wild-card playoff defeat to the Bears at Soldier Field on Saturday night, which saw the Packers blow leads of 21-3 at halftime and 27-16 in the fourth quarter, wasn't the first of its type over the past four months.
Far from it. Which probably makes it a fitting end to a frustrating campaign, as difficult as it is to see a season with such promise fall apart down the stretch.
But rather than rehash how the Packers blew games they controlled with three-phase meltdowns that turned into three losses and a tie in Cleveland, Dallas, Denver and the first trip to Chicago three weeks ago, there's more to discuss here.
Afterward, Head Coach Matt LaFleur pointed to "composure" as an element this year's team lacked.
"We've just got to do a better job of keeping our composure as a football team, and going out and doing the fundamental things that we practice all the time," he said. "When you get into these types of big games, when you don't execute simple fundamentals, it comes back to bite you, and that's exactly what happened."
QB Jordan Love pushed back on the composure element but referred to "the situation we put ourselves in, jumping out to a lead in the first half and then second half, different story."
Whatever the reasons, the list in this one was long, from blocking in both the run and pass game on offense to coverage breakdowns on defense to poor special teams in the kicking and return games.
But this had even more sloppiness than that, including two fumbles – one on a busted-play checkdown completion to an extra offensive lineman and another on a kickoff return by running back Josh Jacobs – the Packers were simply lucky they didn't lose.
There were also two intentional grounding penalties on Love, burning a timeout due to a substitution error on defense, a delay of game right after taking a timeout that made Brandon McManus' third missed kick of the night five yards longer, and a false start with 13 seconds left and the ball 23 yards from the potential game-winning touchdown.
The delay of game LaFleur called "inexcusable," the lost timeout "cannot happen," and he spent a good portion of his postgame press conference saying, "That's a great question" to why so many careless breakdowns occurred, in the playoffs no less.
"It's my job to find answers to those," he said.
All the lost yardage mattered, and one more timeout would've been very useful on the last-ditch drive at the end of the game.
But the story of the season was these Packers constantly making life difficult on themselves, and Saturday night was no exception.
"Our team got a little disheveled in the second half," LaFleur said. "You have to find ways to overcome it, and we just did not do that tonight."
The Bears did overcome, and not just the double-digit deficits. A false start that turned a fourth-and-3 into fourth-and-8 in the fourth quarter, trailing by 11 points, was rendered moot by a clutch off-balance bullet throw by QB Caleb Williams.
It turned out that was the defense's last legitimate chance to stop Chicago, as the last two touchdowns were scored with ease after that. Losing linebacker Edgerrin Cooper to an ankle injury during the Bears' furious comeback didn't help, but it was typical of the way the season went, and Chicago lost a starting linebacker in T.J. Edwards during the game, too.
Offensively, the clock couldn't run out before yet another injury hit, as center Sean Rhyan went down with a knee injury with 32 seconds left, costing the Packers 10 seconds because they were out of timeouts.
Then on what became the game's last play, Love dropped the low shotgun snap from replacement center Lecitus Smith, negating his chance for a quick sideline completion for 5-7 yards to try to wipe out the false start.
Instead, it became a chaos play, as Love scooped up the ball, ran around, and saw eight Bears defenders blanketing the end zone. The final pass had no chance.
It was, mercifully in some respects, the last piece of adversity piled on this team. Not all of it was Green Bay's own doing, as injuries to several key players factored into such a wildly up-and-down season, and those are out of anyone's control.
But by adding so much of their own trouble on top of that, these Packers just didn't help themselves enough.
It's why they ended up as the last seed in the playoffs for the third consecutive year despite looking, at times, much better than a team that squeaked in. And it's why they're one-and-done for the second straight year.
"We're not where we want to be," LaFleur said. "We fought through a lot of adversity this year. Unfortunately we didn't do enough to overcome that adversity, that's all of us collectively.
"We've got to do more, got to do better, because it's never an excuse. I know we lost some key players, but we have to find a way to overcome that, because I think we do have a lot of talent on our team. It's just, it's disappointing."
