Frequently in the NFL, the four preseason games each team plays are nothing more than a tune-up - a chance to get a brief look at your first-stringers (hopefully without anyone getting hurt) and then an opportunity to see the bottom half of the roster take shape with the non-starters proving to the coaches that they belong on the 53-man squad when the regular season starts.
It's not all that common that two teams play each other in the preseason and then lock horns later on in a game that's not just for show, but one that counts in the regular season standings.
Such is the case though this week, as the Green Bay Packers will welcome to town the Jacksonville Jaguars - a team that came out on top in a forgettable 9-7 game in Jacksonville back in August, a game that saw Jaguars kicker Josh Scobee kick his third field goal of the night to provide the winning margin in the fourth quarter.
While only just over three months removed from that preseason meeting, the man who scored the only touchdown in the game - Green Bay wide receiver Robert Ferguson - doesn't expect much to be the same as the first game when the two teams get together again Sunday at Lambeau Field.
"It's a totally different deal," Ferguson said. "I don't think that we'll run anything that we ran in preseason and I doubt if they do either. So it's totally different."
One thing both teams know will be totally different between the two games will be the weather conditions. When the Packers and Jaguars got together in August, the thermometer read 84 humid degrees in the north Florida summer night air.
Forecasters are calling for temperatures to barely crack double-digits Sunday in Green Bay with howling winds to make it feel even colder than that.
Fellow wideout Donald Driver wasn't as quick to discount the benefit of seeing an unfamiliar opponent twice in the same year as Ferguson, though. He said the Packers aren't going to leave any stone unturned in their film study going into Sunday.
"We're going to look at everything," said Driver. "We'll look at our game against them and then we're going to look at the 13 games that they've already played and then go from there and see what we can do."
Tackle Mark Tauscher said he and his teammates will in fact benefit from the earlier match-up with a largely unfamiliar AFC foe.
"Usually when you play teams from the other conference, you really don't have any idea what they're doing personnel-wise and scheme-wise," Tauscher said. "We game-planned that game - I don't know if we brought everything out - but we game-planned the game like it was a regular season game, so you get a chance to really learn about their personnel and I think that does nothing but help us down the line."
He explained just how much of the game plan will carry over from the preseason game.
"We used 61% of the plays in the preseason and then we added 39% more for this week," Tauscher joked. "I went over the plays and we journalized everything and that's exactly the number that came up."
On a more serious note, the lineman said that the game in August will help the Packers in their preparation for this week, but couldn't be sure how much will be just the same.
"They did a lot of stuff - it was the third game and that's usually the game where the starters play the most," he explained. "We got a good taste of the personnel that they have and what they're going to do, but things usually have a way of changing over the course of the season."
