By Tom E. Curran
CSNNE.com
Goodbye, Aaron Rodgers. Hello, 12-2. The jostled brain of Green Bay's talented quarterback will keep him out of Sunday's game, the Packers decided Saturday. As a result, the hottest team in football- your New England Patriots - will face Packers backup Matt Flynn. Rodgers suffered his second concussion of the season last week in Detroit when his head bounced off the turf at the end of a scramble. He only took part in meetings on Friday. An independent neurologist made the call on Rodgers, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The paper (or website, to be accurate) says Rodgers will travel to New England to aid Flynn. Flynn went 15 for 26 for 177 yards and a pick last week. People are high on the potential of the 25-year-old Flynn, a seventh-round pick out of LSU in 2008. Certainly, if he was going to have a game to propel his career, a nationally televised prime-time game against the NFL's hottest team would be a good place to start. On one hand, you have to figure the Patriots will eat Flynn alive. They've chewed up Mark Sanchez and Jay Cutler in consecutive weeks and had little issue with Ben Roethlisberger and Peyton Manning until those quarterbacks went into hurry-up mode against a soft Pats defense protecting a lead. The one caveat to expecting a Flynn dismemberment? The best performance a quarterback's had against the Patriots this year came from Cleveland's Colt McCoy. The rookie backup orchestrated a Browns win in October, using rollout skills and accuracy (along with the running of Peyton Hillis) to upset New England in Cleveland.
Tom E. Curran can be reached at tcurran@comcastsportsnet.com. Follow Tom on Twitter at http:twitter.comtomecurran