GREEN BAY – Coming off their thrilling, Hail-Mary win over the Lions and with the Cowboys coming to town on Sunday, the Packers have transitioned from a loose bunch early in the week to a focused squad preparing for a crucial home game.

Aaron Rodgers and Clay Matthews, the offensive and defensive leaders, respectively, met with reporters in the locker room to discuss a number of topics. They were both asked about a teammate on their side of the ball, the state of the team heading into the season's final quarter and their expectations for the Dallas game.

Below are five question-and-answer highlights from each interview.

Aaron Rodgers

Question: Are you still confident in embattled Eddie Lacy’s ability to be a difference-maker on the field?

Aaron Rodgers: Without a doubt, we have confidence in Eddie. We’ve had a lot of backs around here over the years who have been great cold-weather backs. Ryan Grant, for years, was a better runner in November, December and January than he was in the first couple of months of the season. Eddie is the same way. He’s a tough guy to tackle. He’s a bowling ball out there. He’s a smart guy. He’s a good runner. He’s very agile for a guy his size, and we’re going to need him to play for us and be consistent.

You can inspire guys, but motivation comes from within, like I’ve said many times, and Eddie has great motivation. He’s a great football player. He understands how to play the game, and he’s ready to play every week. It’s just about getting an opportunity. When you see he’s gotten 20-plus carries, he’s made the most of his opportunities. We have to do a better job of converting on third downs and giving him more opportunities to have those first- and second-down runs with extended drives.

Question: What’s different about this Dallas team compared to the one you faced in the playoffs last year?

Rodgers: Obviously the difference at quarterback because Tony (Romo) is gone, but the defense is playing pretty well. They’re sound, disciplined, very well-coached, and they do a good job of forcing you to go the distance and keeping you out of the end zone.

They’re very aggressive, I think that’s evident, that’s what they want to do is pressure the passer and bring a lot of different types of looks. We’ll be ready for all that stuff. They played us a lot more match-up coverage last year. I wasn’t mobile (because of a calf injury), so they played some two-high man last year and made sure they had an idea where Jordy (Nelson) was at all times. Now there’s no Jordy, but I’m healthy so I’m able to kind of run around a little more than I was last year. I would expect a lot of the same that we’ve been seeing, a lot of one-high man stuff.

Question: Has the offense found its identity, and where does it stand right now?

Rodgers: This year as opposed to other years, we’re continuing to work through our identity throughout the year. A lot of that is due to an injury to a key player in preseason. We’ve been trying to find that balance on offense and guys to pick up the slack, and we’ve had a lot of injuries at our skill positions that have made it tough to get that consistency every week. So we’ve got to get our guys back and build on some of the stuff we did in the second half last week.

We’ve got to push through this tough time and find a way to be consistent. I think this time of year, there’s a lot of things that can distract you, in a good way though – the holidays and friends coming into town and other things pulling on you. It’s important that we focus on the things we can control and get ready to play a four-quarter game. I think if you look at the last six or seven games for us, we’ve had a lot of really good halves and not really any consistent full games. So we’ve got to put that together, whatever that means – schematically, execution-wise, we’ve got to find the rhythm that we’ve had at times, when we’ve been able to go up and down the field, but for all four quarters.

Question: For an offense that’s had a lot of past success in December, what do you think of the mild forecasts for Sunday and are you eager for the chance to get a home win?

Rodgers: We’re playing, potentially and a little unfortunately, four straight decent-weather games, if you count the two indoor games and going out to Oakland, where we’re expecting decent weather. And then Sunday they’re calling for a lot warmer than we’d like, those of us who enjoy the cold this time of year. But the cold weather can even things out for sure, definitely with the pass rush, and then depending on the pass rush that can lean in an offensive team’s favor if the field’s a little torn up. Our (grounds-maintenance) guys do a good job with the field, so it’s kind of a wash there.

It’s been obviously a couple losses at home in a row, which is disappointing. This is a big game for us, and we want the crowd to be loud and proud starting at 3:25 for us. It’s an important game, there’s a lot of stuff in front of us, we control our own fate right now and we’ve got to start it with a win this weekend.

Question: What does the team need to do in the final quarter of the season to be successful?

Rodgers: Just be consistent on offense. We’ve been up and down most of the year with our play, so we need to strive for more consistency. We’ve got four games against teams that are all in the (postseason) mix, starting with Dallas this weekend. You know everybody’s playing for something. It’ll be a playoff-style atmosphere and energy, so we’ve got to bring it.

Each of these games is so important for seeding and for the division. Obviously, we’re tied for the division lead right now with the tiebreaker but we’ve got Minnesota at the end of the year, so each one of these games is very important. The early games set up the ability to have things in place, but we obviously didn’t do that in the second part of our season, so we’re going to have to fight and claw to get in this thing.

Clay Matthews

Question: What did you think of rookie inside linebacker Jake Ryan’s performance against the Lions?

Clay Matthews: He’s getting much more confident with the defense, and obviously that’s going to come, much like myself, from getting thrown into the fire. Especially this last week, a lot of communication, a lot of moving parts, but he did a great job, was around the ball multiple times and that’s what we expect from the guys in the middle – to get everybody lined up, make sure we’re all on the same page and at the same time make plays after doing that. He did a great job and hopefully can continue the progress that he’s made thus far.

I think you saw from his production (10 tackles, fumble recovery) that he did a fantastic job in his first true outing as that middle linebacker, so hopefully he can continue to improve on that. I know from my experience in general with football, the more you get in there, the more comfortable you are. I’m sure he’d be the first to admit, there are areas that need to improve – much like myself – but at the same time, they put him in there for a reason.

Question: What’s different about this Dallas team compared to the one you faced in the playoffs last year?

Matthews: They’re a very talented team, but they’re dealing with a situation where they lost their starting quarterback and they’ve had to adapt. So obviously that’s the biggest difference between last year and this year. With (Matt) Cassel back there, they’re still going to try and run the same offense that they’ve had in years prior, but as when we lost Aaron a couple years ago, it takes some figuring out as far as what you want to excel at and protecting certain aspects of the game.

At the same time, we’re not going into this game thinking their quarterback’s down, and we can let up. This is the last quarter of the season, and we need to be playing our best ball, and hopefully that win last week can galvanize this team and propel us to some more victories.

Question: What do you think of the play of veteran Cowboys tight end Jason Witten?

Matthews: He does a great job of getting open, has great body control, knows how to lean into defenders, get them to open their hips. He’s just a very good possession receiver, and that’s not to take anything away from him, I wouldn’t say that’s not a compliment. But he’s the type of guy that will hook up across the middle and, at the end of the day, he has, shoot, 60 to 80 yards and seven to 10 catches.

So he’s just one of those guys who’s a comfort for not only Romo, but now Cassel, in which you know he’s going to be open and you know he’s going to make those catches, and there will be times when we have players on him, keeping an eye on him.

Question: How do you feel the defense is playing right now?

Matthews: We’re confident in the defense we’re playing. You go back to last week, we had a miscommunication between the call that was on the field on one of the touchdowns – Calvin made a great catch on one of them – and then we had the big run in which there was some miscommunication between linebackers and the safeties. But overall, I know you can’t take away big plays, you have to be happy with where the defense is at and keeping us in these close ball games.

We’re going to have a good test coming up these next few weeks, especially this week. That will be the ultimate indicator of where we’re at. But we’re happy with what we’ve been able to accomplish thus far, and we’ve just got to keep buckling down and limiting points. We always talk about giving the ball back to our offense, and it was no more evident than last week on that last possession.

Question: What does the team need to do in the final quarter of the season to be successful?

Matthews: We obviously didn’t make the road easy for ourselves with the past several weeks, with some of the losses that we had, but everything we want is in front of us. We’ve got a big test this weekend against a team that’s obviously without their starting quarterback but is still talented in a number of different areas.

We’ve done a good job of playing some of our best ball toward the end of the year, and it needs to be no different this year because we’ve got a great opportunity in front of us with some of these teams we play that might have playoff implications.