GREEN BAY, Wis. -- There weren't many hotter teams entering the playoffs last season than the Green Bay Packers.
This year, not so much.
Two duds to finish the regular season, including Sunday's last-second 24-22 loss to the Chicago Bears, punctuated by a coaching miscue from Matt LaFleur, sent Green Bay into the postseason as cold as the sub-freezing conditions at Lambeau Field.
"Obviously, we're not going in with momentum," Packers quarterback Jordan Love said. "But who cares?"
There weren't a lot of good feelings that emanated from the home team's locker room Sunday afternoon.
"Losing to these f---ing guys right before the playoffs, it's a kick in the gut," Packers guard Sean Rhyan said. "We've got to flush it and start a new season. That's all we can do."
Said LaFleur: "The guys had some strong words in the locker room. I think their mind will be in the right place, and it all starts with our energy, how we attack it coming into the building. We said this way back when, during training camp. It's 'standards over feelings.'"
Safety Xavier McKinney, who snagged his team-leading eighth interception of the season Sunday, was among the players who spoke up in the locker room after the game. McKinney wouldn't reveal the details of his message but felt it was important to be heard.
"Right now, it's not good enough," McKinney said. "So I've got to go back and look at what I've got to do better to make sure that we are not having these same results when we're coming up short in these games."
Tight end Tucker Kraft said the idea in the postgame locker room was to "make sure that everyone's still together."
"I didn't go into great depth, but there's things I said to guys," Kraft said. "We can't get down on ourselves. We can't point fingers, because truth of the matter is we have more football to play, and we need to do it. Forty-eight guys on the field, one heartbeat. That's the way we've got to move forward."
Sunday's outcome might have been different had LaFleur not called a timeout with 58 seconds left before he opted to send out kicker Brandon McManus for a 55-yard field goal attempt that gave the Packers a 22-21 lead.
If LaFleur had not called the timeout, the Bears almost certainly would have. But it would have left Chicago without a timeout during its final drive. Instead, the Bears used their last one with 28 seconds left to help position themselves for Cairo Santos' 51-yard walk-off field goal.
"That's squarely on me," LaFleur said. "Just got caught in a situation where we were planning on going for it. They felt like Brandon could make that field goal. Hindsight's 20/20, and I wish I wouldn't have taken the timeout because it gave them, obviously, way too much time to go down and operate. Like I told the team, that's on me, that can't happen. So we've got to wipe this as soon as possible. It's a new season now."
The Packers would've ended up as the No. 7 seed in the NFC regardless of Sunday's outcome, but they didn't know that for sure until the game was nearly over because Washington beat Dallas to give the Commanders the No. 6 seed. It means the Packers will play at the second-seeded Eagles to open the playoffs.
They were the same seed last season when they went to Dallas and knocked off the second-seeded Cowboys before losing to the top-seeded 49ers in the divisional round.
But last season, they won three straight games and six of their last eight heading into the postseason, including a Week 18 win over the Bears that put them into the postseason.
This time, they go in on a two-game losing streak, and with losses in three of their final five, plus they have plenty of questions about what went wrong against the Bears. Despite their 11-6 record, the Packers went 1-5 against teams in the NFC playoffs and had only one win in their own division.
On Sunday, it wasn't just LaFleur's timeout that buried them. They got duped on a punt return for a touchdown in the first quarter, and even before Love and Christian Watson left because of injuries in the second quarter, their offense was going nowhere.
And their defense couldn't get a final stop to prevent the Bears from kicking the winning field goal.
"I think everything's fair game right now, I mean, in terms of just all of us," LaFleur said. "It's a collective, and it always starts with me. And like I said, I'm disappointed that I put our team in that situation at the end of the game because just being indecisive. And you can't do that in those critical moments because it came back and burned us."