At almost every turn of the 2025 season, the Green Bay Packers failed to finish — making Saturday night’s collapse at Soldier Field in the NFC Wild Card Round a fitting conclusion to a season marked by missed opportunities and gut-wrenching losses torn from the jaws of victory.
Every NFL season has ebbs and flows. The Packers’ dips were punctuated over and over again by collapse, and once injuries turned the once-promising season into a tailspin, the only logical conclusion was one final calamity, and Saturday night at Soldier Field did not disappoint.
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It was a conglomeration of all the season’s collapses, packaged nicely into one unforgettable defeat at the hands of the franchise’s oldest rival.
It didn’t take long for the 2025 Packers to show their untrustworthy side.
After looking like one of the NFL’s top teams during the first two weeks, the Packers squandered a 10-0 lead in Cleveland, had a go-ahead field goal blocked and lost to the lowly Browns on a field goal as time expired.
A week later, the Packers led 13-0 early in Dallas and held two different leads in the fourth quarter but ended up incredibly fortunate to escape AT&T Stadium with what ended up being an incredibly important 40-40 tie.
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After vanquishing Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers in primetime to get to get to 5-1-1, the Packers returned home and slopped through a 16-13 loss to the Panthers that saw Carolina win with a field goal as time expired after the Packers tied the game in the fourth quarter.
Then, after getting to 9-3-1 with a season-correcting four-game win streak, came one of the most torturous five-week stretches of recent Packers football. The tormenting began with an injury-ravaged collapse in Denver that saw the Packers lose Zach Tom (who didn’t play again in 2025) and Micah Parsons (who tore his ACL) and lose the game after holding a 23-14 lead in the third quarter over the AFC’s No. 1 seed. The Broncos went on a 20-3 run to win it. In many ways, the 2025 season died for the Packers on Sunday, Dec. 14 at Mile High. The corpse of Matt LaFleur’s team never won again.
A week after the Denver debacle, the Packers botched an onside kick and gave up a fourth down touchdown pass, blowing a 10-point fourth quarter lead before losing on a game-ending touchdown pass in overtime in the first of two epic Soldier Field collapses.
The Packers became just the fourth playoff team in NFL history to lose four straight games to end the regular season. This was a ghost ship floating aimlessly into the postseason, but a chance at redemption arrived in the form of a rubber match with the Bears — providing arguably the best possible matchup for a team that no longer belonged in the heavyweight class.
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Yet the final kill shot arrived without mercy on Saturday night, when the Packers led 21-3 at halftime and 27-16 in the fourth quarter before losing 31-27 during one of the franchise’s worst playoff collapses. A dominant first 30 minutes were no match for the pure chaos and buffoonery of the final 30.
The Packers played 18 games during the 2025 season and won nine, or exactly half of the games. In five of the failures, the Packers led by nine or more points.
In an astonishing season that still makes no sense, the Packers lost three games in which they never punted and didn’t win in five games they lead by two scores.
Saturday’s collapse will be studied for weeks, months. It was a truly incredible blend of stale offense, defeats at the line of scrimmage, kicking catastrophes, defensive rupturing and inexcusable coaching mistakes over a 30-minute span.
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The stunning loss would have been inconceivable had it not been so well rehearsed. The 2025 Packers had been building to this moment all season. And now it is over, another season — the 15th since winning a Super Bowl — gone like a fart in the wind.
This article originally appeared on Packers Wire: Packers’ collapse in Chicago provides fitting end to 2025 season
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