Despite less-than-outstanding injury news in Week 7, the Green Bay Packers managed to score a 24-10 win over Washington Football Team despite being outdone in terms of offensive yards. One reason for their conservative inactive list may have been their upcoming game against the undefeated Arizona Cardinals, who they’ll play at Thursday Night Football.
After the game, head coach Matt LaFleur said outside linebacker Preston Smith (weird) was “selfless” not to play against Washington. Smith, who played for Washington before joining the Packers, clearly wanted to play based on how LaFleur spoke of the situation. With that in mind, how unique Green Bay was for Week 7 is justified after LaFleur said, “I would sit here and lie to you if I said it didn’t matter a little to this,” in relation to whether Smith’s activity was affected by her speedy liquidation for Thursday. I think this is just life a short week ago.
Smith isn’t the only player who hasn’t been rushed onto the field, either. Starting left tackle David Bakhtiari (knee, physically incapacitated) and starting wide receiver Marques Valdes-Scantling (thigh, injured reserve) were able to return to the team this week due to their injury list, as did tight end Dominique Dafney (hip) of them was activated for the week 7 action until Saturday, although Bakhtiari trained with the team last week and Dafney has trained for the past two weeks.
Starting cornerback Kevin King (shoulder) also missed the game against Washington after training with the team earlier this week and was classified as questionable on Friday. In his place, Rasul Douglas, who was picked up from the Arizona training team in week 4, made his first start as a packer on Sunday.
Reading between the lines here, you can assume that the Packers felt less threatened by the soccer team than the Cardinals, which enabled them to prioritize week 8 (and beyond) instead of just week 7 on the plan of the Packers, you’d expect Smith, Bakhtiari, Valdes-Scantling, King and Dafney to be closer to the game on Thursday than Sunday. For what it’s worth, the Packers were labeled underdogs in their week 8 match for only the second time this season.
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