The catchword of the day for head coach Mike McCarthy, aka "Mr. Positive," as coaches and assorted players reconvened Monday following the team's three-day break was confidence.
McCarthy uttered "confidence" or "confident" more than a dozen times when addressing various aspects of his team in a news conference at Lambeau Field.
"We feel healthy, and we feel we're confident," McCarthy said. "We're very, very realistic."
The return to work for McCarthy and his staff, whom he had excused from their duties Friday afternoon, was decidedly palatable. Fresh off a 34-12 victory at the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving Day, the Packers are riding a season-best three-game winning streak and in the driver's seat for an NFC wild-card playoff spot with a 7-4 record.
Green Bay's string of wins came in a taxing stretch of 12 days, during which they rebounded from an embarrassing loss at the previously winless Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Nov. 8 and lost Pro Bowl defensive players Al Harris and Aaron Kampman to season-ending knee injuries.
"We knew this three-game stretch was going to be very challenging physically," McCarthy said. "Now, with the time off, we feel like we have a chance to regroup and take a run at these last (five) games. We really like where we are as a football team."
The Packers' stretch run won't commence until they host the Baltimore Ravens on Monday night.
Left with 10 days between the win against the Lions and the next game, McCarthy gave the majority of the players time off Friday through Monday -- injured players reported Monday for treatments and individual workouts.
The whole team will be together again Tuesday for an extra practice built into the extended week. The focus will be two-fold rooted in fundamentals: correcting mistakes from the last game and getting a jump start on the game plan for the Ravens.
"It will be a padded practice," McCarthy said. "It will be a fast, aggressive pace, and we want to get right back into it."
The players will be off again Wednesday, then on their usual three-day practice schedule leading up to a game Thursday to Saturday.
McCarthy's aim this week is to make sure the players don't lose the confidence they have acquired and built on the last three games.
"Confidence is the key, in my opinion, to winning in the National Football League," McCarthy said. "You're always trying to build confidence, whether you are going from spring practice into training camp, from training camp into preseason games, preseason games into regular-season games. You can't buy real confidence.
"We talk a lot about as a football team the difference between false confidence and real confidence. So, confidence is a big part of being successful, and it filters all the way through. All the way through your running the football, stopping the run, big-play opportunities, it's what you're trying to build. To me, it's a major contributing factor in being successful in the NFL."
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