Packers Defense Turns Corner with Dominant Showing Against Rival Vikings

The Green Bay Packers offense showed marked improvement in the team's 30-13 win over the Minnesota Vikings Sunday, but this game belonged to Green Bay's defense, which snapped Minnesota's five-game win streak with its high-pressure, high-intensity showing. 

The Packers unit was dominant against the Vikings, shutting down what has been a productive offense over the last few weeks. 

Vikings running back Adrian Peterson entered Week 11 as the NFL's leading rusher, averaging 106.8 yards per game and coming off of a 203-yard showing against the Oakland Raiders. 

The Packers held him to just 45 yards on 13 carries and an average (3.5 yards per carry) much lower than his previous 4.9 mark.

Minnesota quarterback Teddy Bridgewater had a nice day on paper: 296 yards, a touchdown, no interceptions, a completion rate of 68 percent. 

But Green Bay's defense managed to relocate its ability to pressure the quarterback, which had been missing in its last three matchups, on exactly the right day. 

The Packers' six sacks and 10 hits on Bridgewater disrupted the quarterback enough to cause some failed drives and multiple missed opportunities. 

And incidentally, as ESPN Stats & Information points out, though the Packers experienced a short sack drought, they are in fact the only team in the league with more than one six-sack game:

The first sack—courtesy of Datone Jones, who broke the Packers' three-game slump with no sacks—came on a Minnesota 1st-and-10 early in the second quarter and turned it into a 2nd-and-28. 

Needless to say, the Vikings went three-and-out on that drive. 

And after Julius Peppers flushed Bridgewater from the pocket and sacked him on a particularly hard hit late in the second quarter, the passer even had to exit the game, leaving backup Shaun Hill with a 3rd-and-15 that Minnesota could not convert. 

Bridgewater returned on the next drive, but the hits kept coming. 

Another sack by safety Ha Ha Clinton-Dix in the third quarter for a loss of 10 yards brought up a 3rd-and-23 situation, and though Bridgewater scrambled for 18 yards, the drive was a failure. 

But sacks are just part of the picture, and Green Bay's defense delivered in all areas on Sunday. In addition to the stout run defense and the aforementioned 10 quarterback hits, the defense also had three passes defended and a whopping eight tackles for loss; Clay Matthews and Jones had two each. 

One crucial play by the defense: Early in the fourth quarter, with the Vikings trailing by 14 points and 32 yards from the end zone, safety Morgan Burnett forced Peterson to fumble the ball. Cornerback Sam Shields recovered it.

It all but killed any hopes Minnesota may have had of staging a dramatic late comeback.  

A unit that had looked anemic in terms of pressure over the last three games—all losses—was the driving factor that led to Green Bay's first win since the Week 7 bye.

As ESPN's Matt Bowen noted, the performance changed the flow—and dictated the outcome—of the entire game:

Was it the enormity of the game, the height of the stakes, that gave the Packers the jolt they needed to play well?

The players certainly knew what was on the line in this meeting with Minnesota. A loss would have dropped the Packers two games behind the lead in the division and also given the Chicago Bears a foothold to compete for a wild-card berth.

Matthews certainly knew his unit was capable of this type of performance; in fact, he predicted it.

Ann Heisenfelt/Associated Press

"You just have to stay with it; you can't get frustrated, you can't get agitated about it," Matthews told Bleacher Report on Tuesday when discussing the issues on defense over the last three games, noting that sacks "always come in bunches" and that the defense was due to have a big game. 

"We could all be playing better, and I think that will be the case, especially given we've got three more divisional games coming up here and obviously a huge game against Minnesota for the first-place spot in the division," Matthews said. "So we need to get this thing going and we will."

They certainly did.

Now the Packers, with the head-to-head tiebreaker, once again own the NFC North and control their own destiny.

And given the improvements on offense, too, it's hard not to once again be excited about this team's chances to play into January. 

Michelle Bruton is a Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this article were obtained via phone interview.