Packers decide they've been beaten down one too many times by bigger, better teams

The San Francisco 49ers are a very physical football team, on both offense and defense. Dominating the opponent in the trenches is one way to put it ... hitting them really damn hard is another way. The 49ers impose their will, which we've seen on the big stage multiple times. I can think of a few specific examples in which the 49ers won games on the back of that physicality (that game against the New Orleans Saints a couple years ago ... you know the one ... comes to mind).

But there's one team that does come up more often than others when I think about teams that simply couldn't keep up with the 49ers' physicality: the Green Bay Packers.

Don't get me wrong, the Packers are a very good football team. Aaron Rodgers is, as far as I'm concerned, the third-best quarterback in the NFL and there's some excellent players on both sides of the football. No game against the Packers is a gimmie, and Colin Kaepernick destroying them to the tune of whatever absurd number of yards he had in that one game doesn't exactly fall under "physicality," but it's still worth noting.

Why am I talking about beating the Packers up and down the football field by simply being bigger, stronger and faster than them? Because the Packers have had a couple players speak up recently and talk about "getting mean," and getting bigger ... referencing situations in which they've been "pushed around all the time." In other words: getting manhandled by the 49ers.

There's two interviews in particular I wanted to link. The first is Packers defensive lineman Mike Daniels saying the Packers need to get mean, via Rob Demovsky of ESPN. Daniels notes that multiple Packers players get knocked out of games on offense, and that it's "about time we returned the favor to other teams instead of just getting pushed around all the time."

Another interview is from Rodgers himself, who says he thinks the Packers are a "bigger, more physically intimidating team," again via Demovsky of ESPN.

These are all pretty standard things for any player to be saying, but I still think the 49ers are one of the direct causes of this talk. I planned on being incredibly snarky and telling a bunch of jokes with this article, but honestly, it's the truth. The 49ers beat up the Packers a whole bunch, and if the Packers actually take a lesson from it, then they're just that much more dangerous going forward.