Are the Packers really doing this thing all over again?

It seemed safe to finally bury the Packers.

Quarterback Aaron Rodgers was traded to the Jets in the offseason, taking his needless distractions and thirst for attention — but also his Hall of Fame arm — with him.

Jordan Love took over and was extremely shaky through the first half of the season. Already in his fourth season, Love looked overmatched as Green Bay started 2-5 — the last of those losses a 24-10 setback against the Vikings, who swarmed Love while losing Kirk Cousins in the Lambeau Field romp.

Even as the Packers and Love started to show signs of life in the second half of the year, Love and his young receivers looked just inconsistent enough to be unreliable. I fashioned an opinion that I might end up regretting, as I talked about on Monday's Daily Delivery podcast:

The Packers hadn't found the next Brett Favre or Rodgers, but they might have found their Cousins.

The idea: Love was putting up good numbers — almost identical, in fact to the ones Cousins put up in his fourth year in the league and first one as a full-time starter in Washington — but his ceiling was the second-tier of quarterbacks and not the top.

Perhaps that will still prove to be true, and the Packers' three-decade run of Hall of Fame QB play will end with someone more apt to finish in the Hall of Good.

At the very least, this was supposed to be a rebuilding year for Green Bay with Love, all their young receivers and a defense in flux.

Heck, the Packers didn't even label this a competitive rebuild (at least to my knowledge), but here they are not only in the playoffs but advancing to the final eight in the league.

The immediate path gets harder next week against the top-seeded 49ers, a game that will probably end Green Bay's season.

But the Vikings' reality is this: The Lions and Packers won playoff games Sunday. The Bears are getting better and will gain a massive edge with the No. 1 overall pick in the draft.

The Vikings were 4-4 after beating the Packers this year. Next year, they look like they'll be fourth of four in the NFC North.

*The Wild were booed off the Xcel Energy Center ice following a 6-0 drubbing by Arizona on Saturday, an effort that spawned a closed door meeting afterward.

Here's the deal: This team has too many injuries and not enough talent. They're the hockey Vikings. Until both franchises (starting with their owners) embrace a more honest reckoning of where they are, and give up trying to be both competitive and rebuilding at the same time, they will remain in the lower-middle of their leagues.

*The Gophers women's basketball team had a good win over Nebraska on Sunday, and it came with nearly 100 prominent alums in the building. The most important one: Legendary former player and recent former coach Lindsay Whalen.

*The Wolves' 109-105 win over the Clippers on Sunday felt important on a number of levels. The Clips had all their firepower — Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, James Harden and Russell Westbrook, as fearsome as any quartet in 2017 and still awfully good in 2024 — and the Wolves still won. That's the type of team they will face in the playoffs.