Packers at Vikings final score: Aaron Jones goes off as Packers overcome early miscues to win NFC North

The Green Bay Packers are your NFC North champions. The Packers got off to a slow start against the Minnesota Vikings on Monday night, turning the ball over deep in their own territory twice, setting up the Vikings with an early 10-3 lead. Slowly but surely, though, the Packers worked their way back into the game, and eventually, they took a double-digit lead. 

The Green Bay defense absolutely smothered the Dalvin Cook-less Vikings offense all night, essentially allowing the Vikings just two big plays -- each passes to Stefon Diggs down the right sideline -- and very little else. They kept relentless pressure on Kirk Cousins and did not let either Mike Boone or Ameer Abdullah get untracked on the ground. Za'Darius Smith essentially took over the game by himself, notching 3.5 sacks and five tackles for loss. The Vikings finished with just seven first downs.

Aaron Rodgers did not have his best stuff, and finished the night just 26 of 40 for 216 yards and an interception. But he kept the chains moving with short, quick-strike passes to Davante Adams (13 catches for 116 yards) and Allen Lazard, who did enough to put the Packers in position for Aaron Jones to finish off the job. Jones didn't do much in the first half, but he exploded after halftime and ended the game with 154 rushing yards and two scores. 

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The second of those scores was a 56-yard jaunt that he bounced to the outside and took all the way to the house as he found no Vikings defenders waiting for him in the open field. The Vikings looked for a moment like they had a long touchdown of their own to cut into the lead, but Riley Reiff was called for holding on the play, and the drive quickly fizzled out. 

The Packers got the ball back, ran some clock, and despite giving the ball back to the Vikings with one last shot to engineer a miracle, held on for a 23-10 victory that allowed them to claim the NFC North title.

Let's take a deeper dive into how the Packers cruised past Minnesota on Monday night:

Why the Packers won

De-fense (clap, clap), de-fense (clap, clap). Matt LaFleur's offense shot itself in the foot on a handful of occasions, but Mike Pettine's unit was downright suffocating. With Cook sidelined for Minnesota, the Packers keyed in on making Kirk Cousins uncomfortable, and they did their job as well as they could have, logging five sacks but, more importantly, preventing him from ever establishing a downfield rhythm. Five of Minnesota's first seven possessions came and went without a first down, and it took Cousins until the final five or so minutes of game-play to eclipse 100 yards through the air. Za'Darius Smith led the way with seven tackles, 3.5 sacks and five (!) behind-the-line stops, but pretty much everyone else got in on the act, with Kenny Clark stuffing a late-fourth-quarter third down and Kevin King reeling in a waywardly heaved deep ball to get the Pack in the takeaway column. After recovering from their early turnover spree, the Packers did enough offensively, too, with Aaron Rodgers making a couple signature darts, Davante Adams feasting against Xavier Rhodes and Aaron Jones consistently threading his way into Minnesota's secondary -- and sealing the win with a breakaway fourth-quarter score.

Why the Vikings lost

Cook's absence is definitely part of the reason Minnesota looked out of sync offensively, but the coaching staff also had all week to prepare. Blame it on them, or blame it on the O-line for not giving Cousins more time, or blame it on Cousins for failing to elevate above the circumstances. No matter what, the Vikings stunk with the ball in their hands. And on a night in which Green Bay handed them three turnovers in the first two quarters, even a mediocre performance probably would've been enough to at least take Green Bay to the wire. Instead, they got nothing on the ground, a little from Stefon Diggs, and literally nothing from Adam Thielen. They failed in pretty much every statistical measure. On the other side of the ball, things were solid for much of the game, but once Eric Kendricks left with a quad injury, the run defense went from so-so to porous. Mike Zimmer also deserves some ribbing for some late-game decisions, namely the illogical move to punt on fourth down with less than four minutes to go and his team down 13 points. If not for the Packers coughing up the ball and settling for field goals, the home club might've lost by 20-plus.

Turning point

Up 10-9 just over halfway through the third quarter, the Vikings were hanging on to their lead by a thread. A deep ball from Cousins to Diggs, for 28 yards, then made up for a second-down sack and set up a move into Packers territory -- a prime chance for Minnesota to go up two scores and try playing ball-control. But things quickly shifted in Green Bay's favor when Cousins tried bombing another one to Diggs -- this time all the way inside the Packers' 10-yard line on a first-and-10 no-huddle call. The QB somehow didn't see Kevin King covering deep, and the overthrown ball landed right in the corner's hands. After a 39-yard return, Green Bay proceeded to march the rest of the way for a go-ahead score, then ran its way to an easy victory.

Play of the game

This was the nail in the coffin: Aaron Jones' 56-yard gallop to the end zone to put Green Bay up 23-10 and effectively end any chance of the Vikings winning the North. The beauty of it was how easy Jones made it look, staying patient on his way to the hole, then bursting to the sideline, where absolutely no Viking could catch him.

Quotable

"There are a lot of things to like about Mike Zimmer, but coaching not to lose isn't one of them."

This remark from NFL scout and writer Tommy Lawlor, shared via Twitter during the game, does a nice job summing up the state of the Vikings. This is a team built for a playoff run, particularly if Cook can return, but it's also a team that's pretty consistently fallen short in big games. Zimmer, of course, can't bear all the blame for Cousins and Co. producing all of 139 yards, but it's his job to get the Vikings ready for these types of contests, and they not only failed to stop a division rival (who turned it over three times) from clinching the NFC North on their own turf, but looked very much inept along the way. All is not lost, but Zimmer is a justified question mark entering the postseason.

What's next

The Packers (12-3) will close their 2019 season with a final NFC North showdown, this time against the Detroit Lions (3-11-1) on Sunday, Dec. 29, at 1 p.m. ET. The Vikings (10-5), meanwhile, will host their rival Chicago Bears (7-8) at the same time on the same day, looking to perhaps build some momentum heading into a wild-card playoff matchup.

Relive all the action from Monday night's game right here: