Packers, Colts headed in opposite directions in making NFL history

Only 400 miles separate the bookends of pro football, yet those two NFL teams could wind up further apart than any in history.

The Green Bay Packers are within reach of a 16-0 season.

The Indianapolis Colts are careening toward 0-16.

Franchises have finished the regular season with those records — New England went 16-0 in 2007, and Detroit went 0-16 in 2008 — but never in the modern era has one team gone undefeated and another winless in the same season.

“You could see the Green Bay thing coming,” Hall of Fame coach John Madden said. “They were building a good team, and when Aaron Rodgers’ time came, he was ready. With the Colts, you knew they relied on Peyton Manning, but …

“It’s a quarterback-driven league. On one end, Aaron Rodgers stepped up, and on the other end Peyton Manning went down.”

According to R.J. Bell of Pregame.com, Las Vegas oddsmakers would make the Packers 25-point favorites if Green Bay were to play the Colts this season. That would be the biggest spread in league history.

“Between the No. 1 and No. 32 teams,” Bell said, “there’s a bigger distance than there has ever been.”

Of course, a lot can happen over the next five weeks. There’s no guarantee either team will wind up either “perfect” or perfectly awful, even though each has proven to be remarkably consistent in its weekly performances.

Four of Green Bay’s final five opponents currently have winning records, beginning with Sunday’s game at the New York Giants (6-5). The Packers finish against Oakland (7-4), at Kansas City (4-7), Chicago (7-4) and Detroit (7-4). It’s a formidable stretch, even for a team averaging an NFL-best 34.7 points a game and led by Rodgers, the leading candidate for this year’s most-valuable-player award.

Asked about the possibility of winning every regular-season game, Rodgers said it’s not something the Packers, defending Super Bowl champions, established as a goal at the beginning of the year.

“Our goals are to win the division, get a home playoff game, and give ourselves a chance to go from there,” he said. “But we’ve put ourselves in a good position to even be able to talk about [this] by taking care of business the first 11 games. Keep plugging away, and hopefully we’ll still be talking about this at the end of the season.”

The end of the season cannot come soon enough for the Colts, who have utterly collapsed without four-time MVP Manning, who is recovering from neck surgery. They are 0-11 for the first time since 1986, when they dropped their first 13 games.

The same franchise that two years ago flirted with perfection, going 14-0 before resting starters and coasting into the playoffs, has suffered such indignities as a 34-7 loss to Houston, a 31-7 loss to Atlanta, and a cover-your-eyes 62-7 loss to New Orleans — on national TV, no less.

The Colts’ game at New England on Sunday was supposed to be NBC’s Sunday night game, but the network opted out of that matchup at its first chance, instead flexing to Detroit at New Orleans. Colts-Patriots, arguably the NFL’s defining rivalry of the past decade, looks to be a laugher in the making.

That said, Patriots Coach Bill Belichick came unhinged this week when asked about the Colts being pushovers. He called the mere suggestion “garbage.”

“I don’t agree with that,” Belichick said. “So, you can go ahead on your soliloquy about that, but I just don’t agree with that. You don’t think you can gauge a team based on how a player blocks [Colts Pro Bowl defensive ends] Dwight Freeney and Robert Mathis? I mean, who else would you gauge it against?

“What? Are you kidding me? Covering [receivers] Reggie Wayne, [Austin] Collie, and [Pierre] Garcon — you don’t think you can gauge your coverage based on those players? I don’t care what their record is. You don’t think there’s better receivers around than them? Better pass rushers than Freeney and Mathis? I mean, I’m not sure what games you’re watching here.”

If any coach understands that past performances aren’t always accurate predictors of the present, it’s Belichick. After going 16-0 in the regular season four years ago, his Patriots were upset in the Super Bowl by the New York Giants. So nothing is a lock.

After Sunday, the Colts finish the season at Baltimore (8-3), at home against Tennessee (6-5) and Houston (8-3), and at Jacksonville (3-8).

The Colts don’t need another bad omen, but here’s one: Their quarterback du jour is Dan Orlovsky, who started seven games for the Lions when they went 0-16. He’s the third quarterback for Indianapolis this season, following Kerry Collins and Curtis Painter.

“I’m not going to be Superman or anything like that,” said Orlovsky, making his first start since 2008. “I’m just going to run the offense, try to get us in good situations, try to move the chains and go from there.”

Anything can happen, of course, but naturally the matchup between the Packers and Giants looks to be far more competitive than Colts-Patriots.

A decade before the Giants beat the then-undefeated Patriots in the Super Bowl, they knocked off another team that appeared to be heading toward perfection. On Dec. 13, 1998, New York protected its home field by beating the 13-0 Denver Broncos, who were favored by 121/2 points.

“Nobody gave us a chance,” Kent Graham, Giants quarterback at the time, recalled this week in an interview with the New York Post. “They were really good. I remember going in early in the morning and trying to watch film before practice. I told my wife, Courtney, ‘I don’t know if we can beat them, they’re that good.’ ”

But the Giants did win, 20-16, beating the John Elway-led Broncos with a 37-yard touchdown pass to New York’s Amani Toomer with 48 seconds left.

“It was our Super Bowl,” Toomer told the Post.

Now, two Super Bowl winning franchises — the Packers and the Colts — are rocketing in opposite directions.

Joe Horrigan, a Pro Football Hall of Fame vice president, said there would be some type of acknowledgment in the Hall if the Packers were to finish 16-0, and likely an enhanced exhibit if the Colts were to simultaneously go 0-16.

“We probably would do something,” Horrigan said. “We’d have to be sensitive because we wouldn’t want to embarrass a team or cause more of a bad feeling that they’ve already experienced. It would be more something commemorating the curiosity of it all.”

Bookends teams, who might just be bracketing a season for the ages.

sam.farmer@latimes.com

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