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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Mark Tauscher earns SI's Offensive Player of the Week




January 14, 2008


The Awards Section

Offensive Players of the Week


Green Bay T Mark Tauscher. Strange pick, given that Green Bay had a back rush for 201 yards on Saturday and Brett Favre played as good a bad-weather game as I've ever seen a quarterback play.

Here's why I picked Tauscher: The storyline going into the game centered around the quick Seattle defensive front seven because wild-card weekend had featured an indomitable performance by left end Patrick Kerney. And Kerney always had good success pass-rushing against Favre, with four career sacks of him.

On Saturday, matched man-on-man all day with Tauscher, Kerney's line was: zero tackles, zero assists, zero quarterback pressures. Obviously the weather was a huge help to Green Bay. "Torque and leverage are so important to a pass-rusher's speed,'' Holmgren had told me Friday. "They love a fast track.'' They didn't have one, certainly, but even in run plays Tauscher got low and had excellent leverage; on one of Grant's long runs, replays showed Tauscher burying Kerney.

Said Grant: "There were so many times I didn't get touched until the second level [the secondary]. Those guys up front did a phenomenal job.'' Particularly the right tackle.

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