Packers guard Anthony Belton talks about preparing for his first playoffs
Green Bay Packers rookie offensive lineman Anthony Belton is looking forward to the chance to play in the playoffs when the Packers face the Bears.
- The Green Bay Packers hold a significant advantage in playoff experience over the Chicago Bears.
- Green Bay has 15 starters who have played in a postseason game, compared to seven for Chicago.
- Coach Matt LaFleur will be coaching his ninth playoff game, whereas it will be Bears coach Ben Johnson’s first as a head coach.
GREEN BAY – Anthony Belton could barely contain the excitement. He was standing at his locker, trying to keep it cool with his first NFL playoff game looming, but that smile betrayed him. His eyes were big.
This week, he knows, is going to be unlike anything the Green Bay Packers rookie guard has seen before.
“I’ve just been trying to take it day by day,” Belton said. “Just keep calm. Because this is my first one. So just trying not to make the pressure too big. Just trying to be where my feet are at.”
Calm is good. It’s also hard entering a playoff game with an entire season on the line. Win or go home isn’t just cliché. It’s reality. When you’ve never faced those stakes before, there’s no need to make the pressure too big. The pressure takes care of that all on its own.
Fortunately for Belton, he has an entire locker room of veterans he can pull advice from this week, ask questions and prepare his best for what these four quarters following kickoff in the NFC wild-card round will be like. A luxury the Chicago Bears do not have. In what’s expected to be the closest matchup of wild-card weekend − the Packers only 1-point favorites against the Bears − there is one lopsided advantage.
The Packers have a locker room full of playoff experience. The Bears have much less.
Before this season, the Packers were expected to be NFC contenders because they were still young, but over the past two seasons had accumulated the necessary exposure to the NFL’s biggest moments. Belton is their only starter who never has played in a postseason game. Collectively, their other 21 starters have amassed 41 starts in 61 playoff games.
The Bears starters have accumulated 61 starts in 68 playoff games, but the raw numbers are misleading. Left guard Joe Thuney, who won two Super Bowls apiece with New England and Kansas City, accounts for 21 starts and games. He’s surely fielding plenty of questions in the locker room this week. Thuney is among only 11 starters for the Bears who know what the playoffs are like.
Broken down another way, the Packers have 15 starters who have appeared in a playoff game. The Bears have seven. Quarterback Jordan Love will be making his fourth postseason start. Caleb Williams will be making his first.
Matt LaFleur will be coaching his ninth playoff game. It will be Ben Johnson’s first playoff game as a head coach.
“I think there’s some value in that,” LaFleur said. “Ultimately, it’s about just being able to go out there and kind of channel your emotion, and go out and execute. The team that can typically do that the best is probably going to be the team that wins the game.”
Johnson has an idea of what awaits his team this week. He was the Detroit Lions offensive coordinator in 2023, coaching for a team with a success-starved fan base that hadn’t celebrated a playoff win since 1991. In their wild-card matchup at home against the Los Angeles Rams, there was an added element of longtime Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford making his return to Detroit.
The Bears also will be playing in front of a success-starved fan base at Soldier Field this week. Chicago last won a playoff game in the 2010 NFC divisional round, one week before losing to the Packers in the conference title game. It’s their only playoff victory since making a Super Bowl run in 2006.
“We’re really looking forward to an opportunity to go at them again in front of our home crowd,” Johnson said of his team’s third game against the Packers this season. “These guys, you really have felt this city come alive over the course of this season. That’s something I’m grateful for. I’m certainly not downtown a whole lot, but when I’m down there for game day, night before the game, I definitely feel that vibe. So keep a good thing going.”
The exuberance of playoff football returning to Chicago can quickly flip. In the Lions’ 2023 win against the Rams, they got off to a 14-3 lead. The hot start help alleviate the pressure of that moment, especially when the Rams made a late run to get back into the game.
If the Packers start hot this week, the ghosts that have haunted the Bears in this rivalry could return. For decades, the Packers have won these games. The Bears haven’t.
“I’ve been watching the rivalry all my life, really, being a kid from Chicago,” Packers receiver Jayden Reed said. “It was hard being a Bears fan, because you just watch the Packers beat the Bears every year, from my perspective.”
The Packers can send those bad memories into the collective minds of the Soldier Field crowd this week. If they do, the pressure will be on the home team. And the home team will have fewer players who have dealt with that kind of pressure in their careers.
It’s the clearest advantage the Packers have entering this postseason matchup, and they must know it.
Just don’t expect them to lean into it.
“I ain’t about none of that,” safety Xavier McKinney said. “Because regardless of experience, that don’t mean you can’t get beat. So I try not to push that message to the guys because I think regardless of experience or not, [expletive] can still go out there and get beat regardless if you’ve got hell of experience or not. So I just don’t think that’s really the right message to go about it. I don’t really think about it that way.”
