NFL green bay Packers

With a 30-24 win over San Francisco Sunday at Lambeau Field, the Green Bay Packers thrust themselves into the thick of the NFC playoff race. At 6-4, Green Bay kept pace with the New York Giants, who also won, and jumped ahead of the team the Giants beat (Atlanta).

However, it was a costly win for the Packers.

The defense may have suffered a couple of major blows with potentially serious knee injuries to outside linebacker Aaron Kampman and cornerback Al Harris.

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Brian Brohm has left the Packers' practice squad and joined the Buffalo Bills active roster, in a move that seems pretty good for both Brohm and the Bills' organization.

According to the Journal-Sentinel in Milwaukee, the Packers attempted to retain Brohm (he was a second round pick two years ago) to the practice squad, but obviously the former Louisville quarterback preferred the notion of actually having a shot at playing with Buffalo when presented with equal contracts.

GREEN BAY, Wis. -- Nobody had to tell Charles Woodson the Packers needed this game. The team didn't have to call any meetings or make any fiery pregame speeches about protecting houses and separating backs from walls. When they showed up for work Sunday morning, the Packers were 4-4 and reeling from an inexplicable loss to the Buccaneers the week before. The mission couldn't have been clearer if it had been tattooed on the insides of their eyelids.

"I don't think anything needed to be said, " Woodson said when it was all over. "But me, I believe in self-motivation."

So Woodson motivated himself into a frothing frenzy and completely took over Sunday's game. He blanketed Dallas tight end Jason Witten. He forced fumbles, made a critical interception and basically made sure he was everywhere he needed to be -- even if that meant being everywhere at once. If there's one player who's the reason the Packers are 5-4 instead of 4-5, it's their still-hungry 33-year-old cornerback.

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GREEN BAY, Wis. -- You could smell this game as far away as Madison, and the part of it that stunk the worst was the Dallas Cowboys offense. On an afternoon in which everybody -- the officials, the head coaches, the offensive lines...everybody -- seemed to be conspiring to set the game of football back 40 years, it was the Cowboys who came up the smallest, committing 10 penalties and converting just 3 of 12 third downs in a 17-7 loss to the Packers at Lambeau Field.

"This was an impressive win for Green Bay," Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said. "But it was unimpressive the way we didn't execute, especially early, when we still had a chance to get the game going the way we wanted it to go."

But the most disappointing part for the Cowboys was that, by losing this game, they blew a very real chance to get the season going the way they wanted it to go.

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For weeks, people have asked if the Cincinnati Bengals are for real. The team keeps responding by finding ways to win games, but the questions keep coming in. This week, they get a chance to sweep the defending Super Bowl champions. Green Bay was picked by many to be a playoff team this season, but they've limped their way to 4-4, got worked by a former teammate, and now face a virtual must-win against red-hot Dallas. Meanwhile, the Colts and Patriots are stealing the spotlight for another high-profile meeting.

We'll chat about all of this at 12 P.M. Eastern, and we invite you to join us after the jump!

Every week FanHouse looks at some aspect of NFL line play for the weekly Between The Lines feature.

Because of bye weeks, most teams are halfway through their season even as we're getting ready to watch Week 10. The halfway point seems like as good a time as any to roll out complete sacks allowed stats.

These stats were culled by watching each and every sack that has occurred in the NFL this season (with the exception of a couple of minutes of a Redskins-Chiefs game that was lost because of a broadcasting problem). In going back and watching every sack, I timed the time from the snap to the initial hit on the quarterback (then rewound it and timed it a couple of more times to confirm the time) and tried to assign blame to the person responsible for giving up the sack.

Every week, NFL FanHouse hits the lowlights from Sunday's action, looking at those players who did the most to move their head coaches that much closer to returning to the Bed and Breakfast business.

My colleague Tom Herrera sometimes talks about this generation of hyper-knowledgeable NFL fans, thanks to the proliferation of fantasy football and better exposure to all 32 teams. And yet there are still large amounts of people who underestimate, outside of your obvious game-changing and/or explosive plays, the impact of special teams on the final score.

So it goes.

For the second straight week, our focus is on a Florida team pulling out a win in which special teams made a large impact. Sometimes that impact was obvious, sometimes it wasn't. Yet it was a constant presence in one of the most embarrassing losses of the season, one which might have broken the camel's back in Green Bay.

TAMPA -- A very amusing story died on Sunday. A better one might have been born.

We came not to bury the Bucs, but laugh at them with their rookie quarterback and creamsicle uniforms. Instead, the joke is on the Packers.

"I don't think it's embarrassing," Packers guard Daryn Colledge said after the 38-28 loss. "The fact is they are a professional football team."

Just barely. The Bucs were so inept in their first seven games they gave us real hope we'd see another 0-16 season.

It's not that I enjoy watching Raheem Morris suffer. It's just that if you're going to stink, you might as well really stink to keep things interesting. These Bucs will never be the novelty act their forefathers were.

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Though most had the Minnesota Vikings as the favorites to win the NFC North heading into the season, nearly everyone agreed that either the Chicago Bears or Green Bay Packers -- or both -- would at least pose a challenge to the Vikes' second straight division crown. Instead, we're taking this division race off life support and putting it to rest after Week 9. The 2009 NFC North champions will be the Vikings. They can now focus on securing home-field advantage in the playoffs.

The reason for the above sentiment is that both the Bears and Packers were abysmal, in different circumstances, Sunday afternoon. The Pack went into Tampa Bay and lost to the formerly winless Buccaneers, while the Bears were absolutely manhandled for the majority of the afternoon by a fickle Arizona squad.

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Editor's Note: Bruce Ciskie, a lifelong Packers fan, opines about the state of his beloved team.

High expectations greeted the Green Bay Packers in August, as the team arrived at training camp. Practices -- held across the street from Lambeau Field -- were very physical, as the Packers tried to show they wouldn't be bullied around like they were far too often in 2008.

That 6-10 season, we all were told, was a memory. It was a fluke. It wasn't how things would be conducted in Green Bay. Bad tackling, soft defense, poor special teams play, and stupid penalties were going to be a thing of the past.

Or not.