The Green Bay Packers escaped Sunday afternoon with a tightly contested win over Detroit. It’s hard to win in the NFL and the Pack did, so despite the closer-than-expected score, it was a good day for the green and gold. The weekend ended even better for Green Bay fans when the New York Giants exposed Chicago on Sunday Night Football.

It’s been downhill since.

Tuesday opened with the news that safety Morgan Burnett had torn his ACL and would miss the rest of the season. This was a pretty good-sized blow for a secondary already missing Al Harris.

Still, the secondary has been pretty good this season. The Packers are seventh in the league in pass defense through four weeks, giving up 185 yards per game. And Atari Bigby will be back eventually, so Burnett’s loss alone won’t kill Green Bay’s chances to compete for a Super Bowl.

But the news got worse.

A few hours later news leaked that the Buffalo Bills had traded Marshawn Lynch. To Seattle. For a fourth round pick next year and a conditional pick in 2012. Really? Ted Thompson wouldn’t cough up a fourth round pick to improve a run game that, so far, has looked anemic since Ryan Grant was shelved after a week one leg injury?

The Packers are averaging 94.5 yards per game through the first quarter of the season, 22nd in the league. The team averages 3.9 yards-per-carry (tied for 19th) and 24 attempts per game (21st). They have four rushing touchdowns, which ties them for fourth in the league, but so far Brandon Jackson and John Kuhn are far from proving they can carry the load they’ve been asked to take over since Grant went down.

I understand this is a passing team. And it should be. Aaron Rodgers is fantastic and with Greg Jennings, Donald Driver, Jordy Nelson, James Jones, Jermichael Finley and Jackson, among others, the Packers are well-equipped to be competitive through the air, despite an offensive line that is better than it was during the first half of the 2009 season but still is not top notch by any stretch.

I also understand the NFL has become a pass-first league. But teams that can achieve balance are better for it and the Packers play in the northernmost part of the country, meaning weather could become a factor and the Packers likely will be faced with situations in which they have to run the ball.

Furthermore, with another matchup against Chicago and two against Minnesota, they won’t want Rodgers dropping back three-quarters of the time while giving those defenses no reason to slow their pass rushers. Jared Allen made the Pro Bowl sacking Rodgers last year and Peppers could do the same this season. Many Packers fans were not at all happy to find out Thompson would not match the deal Seattle offered for Lynch.

But that wasn’t the end of the bad news for Packers fans. Finally, as the clock ticked toward the end of the day, Fox Sports reporter Jay Glazer tweeted that New England and Minnesota were discussing a trade that would bring Randy Moss back to Minnesota.

So what? Minnesota has looked awfully ordinary so far this season. Sidney Rice is out and Brett Favre looks almost disinterested so far. The Vikings had their chance last year and blew it.

Well, maybe so. But Zygi Wilf might have a stadium on the line and these talks show that he isn’t willing to concede the division or a potential Super Bowl, at least without a fight. And with Bigby and Harris already out and Burnett’s injury announced earlier today, Green Bay would suddenly look incredibly susceptible against a Minnesota team whose passing game has been limited to dinking and dunking to this point in the season.

Moss might not be the player he was when he was burning the Packers through the late 1990s and early 2000s. But he’s still a deep threat and he will require coverage downfield. Even if he’s a decoy 90 percent of the time that will take defenders out of the box, opening holes for Adrian Peterson and giving guys like Percy Harvin and Greg Camarillo openings in the middle of the field.

If this deal goes down, it in no way means the Vikings have a lock on the Super Bowl or even the NFC North. But the NFC is wide open and it will be even more so. I remain a believer in the Pack and a non-believer in the Bears. I hedged my bets on the Vikings at the beginning of the season and they dug themselves a hole through the first three games.

But Tuesday was a bad day for Green Bay, even if the Moss deal doesn’t get completed. If it does? The NFC is a whole new ballgame.