After defeating the Seattle Seahawks in a 14-3 defensive struggle last week, the Green Bay Packers now face what is shaping up to be a classic quarterback matchup when they take on the heavily favored San Francisco 49ers on Sunday, with a trip to Super Bowl 54 as the grand prize.
On the Green Bay side, 36-year-old Aaron Rodgers stands one win away from moving on to just the second Super Bowl of his 15-year, future Hall of Fame career, in his 19th postseason game. But Rodgers — the Packers 2005 first-round draft pick — spent the first three years of that career stuck on the bench behind another Hall of Fame quarterback, Brett Favre, before he was able to so much as start a game.
So Rodgers can likely relate to his opposite number with San Francisco, 28-year-old Jimmy Garoppolo, who made it through his first full season as a starter in 2019. Drafted in the second round by the New England Patriots in 2014, Garoppolo was held on the bench behind Tom Brady — with the exception of Brady’s four-game “Deflategate” suspension in 2016 — until he was traded to San Francisco in the middle of the 2017 season.
Since then — despite missing all but three games with an injury in 2018 — Garoppolo has rolled up a 19-5 record as a starter, per Pro Football Reference , and has now led the ‘Niners to the doorstep of their first Super Bowl since the 2012/2013 season.
A panel of ESPN experts previews the Rodgers-Garoppolo matchup, in the video below.
When the two teams, and quarterbacks, met in Week 12 — also at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California — the 49ers were barely challenged, cruising past Green Bay 37-8, per PFR . In that game, the San Francisco defense held Rodgers to just 104 yards in the air on 33 attempts, including his team’s only touchdown.
On the other side, Garoppolo threw for a respectable 253 yards on only 20 attempts, including a pair of touchdowns. Finishing the game with a 145.8 passer rating, the performance was Garoppolo’s best of the season.
The two teams finished the regular season with identical, 13-3 records, but perhaps as a result of that earlier contest, San Francisco heads into the matchup as heavy, seven-point favorites to win the game and move on to Miami for Super Bowl 54, against either the Tennessee Titans or Kansas City Chiefs , depending on the outcome of the AFC title game earlier in the day, according to odds published by Newsweek .
The 49ers have been good at beating the spread this season, with a 10-6-1 record, fifth-best in the NFL. But the Packers have been even better, covering 11 times against six misses, third-best overall.
The NFC title game kicks off at 3:40 p.m. PST in Santa Clara, or 6:40 p.m. EST. The Fox Network has the national television broadcast, with streaming video provided by the network’s online Fox Sports Go service.
