It’s one of those things that makes you say "go figure."

How can the Green Bay Packers, one of the hottest and most potent teams in football, play so badly and lose to the Buffalo Bills?

How, indeed?

There are several ways to look at a game that had such a surprising outcome.

The first, and the easiest way, is just to look at numbers. Aaron Rodgers completed just 17 of 42 passes. He had no touchdowns. He passed for 100 fewer yards than he had averaged leading up to this game. Two passes were intercepted. Jordy Nelson dropped a sure touchdown pass. Randall Cobb and Davante Adams and Jarrett Boykin dropped passes.

But it’s not just numbers that tell a story.

The numbers are just a measure, not a cause.

Sometimes, in every sport, there are massive disruptions in the personality of a team that creates a kind of mental or emotional havoc that keeps players and teams from doing their best.

Don Nelson, a longtime friend and former NBA coach, once talked about it from the standpoint of a player and a coach.

"I’ve seen it happen many times," he told me once. "The early efforts don’t work and that failure just kind of multiplies. I’ve watched team fall apart when things don’t go their way."

But even Nelson admitted that he couldn’t figure out the "why" of that equation.

If Rodgers used the word "execute" once in his postgame news conference, he used it a dozen times. The Packers, he said, failed to "execute."

That’s what happened. It’s not the reason. Every athlete says that they failed to execute after a surprising defeat.

You have to wonder what that means. Clearly this is a team that knows how to run routes, throw the ball, catch it, block, tackle, cover receivers and all that other stuff. It’s not that there were knowledge gaps between the Bills and the Packers. Everybody agreed that the Bills didn’t do anything the Packers didn’t expect.

So if we take out the element of surprise and the element of "we forgot how to do this stuff," then what do we have left?

James Lofton, the former Packers wide receiver, is a thoughtful man who graduated from Stanford and who was very interested in what it took to be a great athlete. He was constantly examining his mental and emotional preparation for football games.

"A big part of it is being ready for the game," Lofton told me once. "There is so much that goes into that. But sometimes it doesn’t matter what you think. At some level, maybe even a level you don’t recognize, there is a feeling that you just don’t want to play. And if that is there, it can really gain a momentum that you can’t stop."

That’s part of it. There is something inside that says "you don’t have it today." You don’t hear that message, but it’s there. It causes things like losing concentration, as Jordy Nelson clearly did when he dropped that touchdown pass. He called it "short arming" the catch. But when your concentration is clear, you don’t short arm a catch.

Don Nelson used to say that the biggest thing that a coach had to do was to make sure his players believe that they were going to play well. Not the cheering kind of thing you see when they bounce around on the sidelines before the kickoff.  Not the paying attention in practice or the film study in the time before a game. But the idea that they could repeat, time after time, the good things they had been doing.

My brother, Dr. Dan Begel, is the founder of the Sports Psychiatric section of the American Medical Association. He’s spent a lifetime working with world class athletes and studying what makes them tick. I asked him about the Packers, winners of five in a row and their failure to win No. 6.

"They’re human," he said. "They needed a rest. The good thing is that they all rested at the same time."

It’s almost as if there is a collective psyche for these athletes and when that psyche says it’s time to shut down -- to take a rest -- there is no way to stop it.

Think of putting in long, long days at work, day after day. At some point your effectiveness is going to drop.

This may not be the entire answer, but I think that collective rest is something that hit the Packers Sunday. Now we just hope they get out of bed and start working again next weekend.