You may have noticed a marked lack of enthusiasm for the Packers’ chances for a Super Bowl trip, even given their seventh straight postseason appearance.

The obvious reason is that the Packers have recently been playing more like a team that doesn’t deserve a playoff berth, 10 wins notwithstanding. They play the final first-round playoff game Sunday at 9–7 Washington, the champion of the NFC (L)East, while Minnesota, having won the NFC North title by beating the Packers Sunday night, gets to host Seattle, which should be favored in every sense except for Sunday’s predicted Arctic weather. (Former Vikings coach Bud Grant is smiling.)

The Redskins won the NFC (L)East because, well, someone had to. None of the Redskins’ nine wins this season are over playoff teams. They got into the playoffs by winning their last four games, over Chicago, Buffalo, Philadelphia and Dallas — interestingly, all but Buffalo on the road.

Sunday’s game features the 10th best scoring offense, the Redskins, against the 12th best scoring defense, the Packers, and the 23rd best scoring offense, the Packers, against the 17th best scoring defense, the Redskins. The Packers’ rankings don’t really make sense based on past seasons, though they do based on this season.

If you give up 18 points at home to Detroit, 17 at home to Da Bears, and 20 at home (seven of which were scored by the defense) to the Vikings, those should be wins, not losses. The Packers are three touchdowns away from being 13–3 instead of 10–6.

Pete Prisco points at the other side of the ball:

The Rodgers-led Packers offense we’ve come to expect — the explosive, entertaining and, most importantly, winning offense — hasn’t shown up much in 2015.

This version is a clunky, ugly, laborious offense that isn’t rolling up big numbers and didn’t win a division title for the first time since 2010. This offense can’t run it. The line can’t protect. The receivers don’t win. And Rodgers is a shell of himself — or a shell-shocked version of himself.

Rodgers has been sacked 46 times, the second-highest total for any passer, five behind league-leader Blake Bortles. This is stunning for a team that had five returning offensive linemen back from 2014, and have a quarterback in Rodgers who is great escaping the rush and seeing the field.

Rodgers can still move away from pressure, but he’s held the ball longer this season in large part because the receivers can’t get open. When Rodgers hits the top of his drop, the ball has to be ready get out in the Green Bay system. Most of the time, when he’s ready to load, the receivers are plastered. That leads to his dropping his head to take a look at the pressure in front of him, and sometimes it leads to missed chances and him leaving clean pockets.

It’s hard to blame him when he’s taken a beating like he’s taken this season. The line has had its share of injuries, and veteran left tackle David Bakhtiari, who missed the past two weeks, wasn’t playing great when he was in the lineup. Right tackle Bryan Bulaga missed four games, and his play is down. And don’t even mention backup Don Barclay. The guy is like a turnstile when he plays.

In the past two games, against playoff teams in the Arizona Cardinals and Minnesota Vikings, Rodgers was sacked 13 times, lost three fumbles, two for touchdowns, and was picked off twice.

The Packers have four touchdowns in the past three games. That used to be a game’s worth when the offense was rolling. …

All year I’ve been waiting for him to turn it on and get back to being the Rodgers we’ve come to expect. It just hasn’t happened. Even when coach Mike McCarthy took back play-calling duties from Tom Clements, little changed. Sure, there have been moments where they’ve moved the football, but it just doesn’t look right.

Rodgers’ completion percentage is 60.7, which is the lowest since he became a starter in 2008. It’s nearly three percentage points lower than his number from his first season as a full-time starter. His completion percentage this season ranks him 26th in the league.

His per-attempt number is down to 6.7 yards per throw, which ranks 30th in the league. Since 2009, he’s been over 8.0 yards per attempt in every season and was at 9.2 in 2011 and 8.4 last season.

With Rodgers struggling, the offense finished 15th in scoring and 25th overall. Rodgers was 17th in the league in third-down passing. Seventeenth? This guy has been a third-down assassin in his career. In his career, Rodgers had a passer rating of over 100 in five seasons on third down. This season, it was 85.3 with a completion percentage of 51.9 percent.

As a team, the Packers converted 33.65 percent of their third downs this season, ranking 27th in the league, and 24.4 percent the past three weeks. They were at 46.67 percent in 2014.

The biggest issue is that the receivers aren’t fast and there is little creativity to help them get open. When Jordy Nelson went down, the Packers lost their best receiver and that led to teams playing a lot of man coverage against the Green Bay receivers and daring them to win.

They’ve loaded the box to stop the run, which slowed that part of the offense, and nobody can win outside. The Packers have a system that uses mostly isolation routes, which means the receivers have to beat their man coverage with their speed and their ability to run routes, rather than help from a pick or a rub or a bunch formation.

That’s all well and good when the line is good and Nelson is on the field, but it hasn’t worked this year. …

I went back and watched some of the Green Bay tape from 2014. One of the games I watched was their victory over the eventual Super Bowl-champion Patriots. What I saw was creativity that hasn’t been used much this season, but needs to be used in the postseason.

They used [wide receiver Randall] Cobb in a variety of ways, including lining him up a bunch in the backfield. That helped create matchup problems for the New England secondary and linebackers. The Packers did it some late last week against the Vikings when they were playing catch up, and it seemed to work as well. …

The Packers need to do more of that. I know it’s not a big part of what McCarthy wants to do, but it’s time to make changes. Get creative. Try and get receivers who can’t win on their own open some other way. …

Is it fixable? The way the offense is being run now, it’s not with the personnel they have. The Packers lack outside speed with receivers who can win consistently, and opposing defenses know it.

The Packers came out in “22” personnel last week and tried to play power football with [running back Eddie] Lacy. He did some good things, but they still didn’t score points. There were no chunk plays. This is an offense that needs chunk plays.

My solution: Let Rodgers play more from the no-huddle and use picks and rubs and bunch formations to help compensate for the lack of quality receiving threats. Then as you play fast, get teams off-balance, and then come back to Lacy out of the spread, not the “22” personnel.

If they do that, we just might see the Aaron Rodgers we’ve come to expect, the NFL’s best passer.

If they don’t, the reigning MVP might be one-and-done in the playoffs and the heat will be on in Green Bay.

The good news is that the Redskins have no one’s definition of even a good defense. Washington ranked 28th in the NFL in defensive yardage, though the Redskins are 17th in scoring defense, perhaps because they’re 14th, plus-4, in takeaway/giveaway ratio. (The Packers are plus-5, tied for 10th.)

The bad news is that, while the Packers have not been playing well of late, the Redskins have, though that may have to do as much with their weak schedule as with their actual play. The Packers are a Hail Mary away from having gone 3–7 since their bye week, with just one of their four post-bye wins over a playoff team, the Vikings.

The intangible thought is that maybe the pressure will be off the Packers with a number-five NFC seed playing all their games on the road. (The Packers have the same road record as home record this year, with, bizarrely, a perfect NFC North road record and a winless NFC North home record.) Whether that’s true or not, it is not debatable that unless the Packers start playing much better on the offensive line, the Packers won’t be in the playoffs very long.