I’m kind of fascinated by the machinations of talk radio. Sports or politics or whatever, it’s amazing to me that someone can go out and fill three hours of airtime five days a week for years.

When I was at WTMJ in Milwaukee, I got to work with a couple of great talk radio hosts. Both had unique styles on the air, and whether you agree with their politics or not, they were good at their jobs. They filled the airtime, got callers talking, and kept listeners coming back.

One day I sat down with one of them in the studio to do a newscast a bit early. His show was at a commercial break and he wasn’t focused on anything else, so I asked him what it was like to host a radio show like his every day. He thought for a second, then said “You know, I’ve always thought that anybody could do this once. You’ve probably got enough thoughts about what’s going on in the world right now to fill up a talk show for a day. The trick is learning what gets people going the next day, and the day after, and the day offer.”

He offered a few more thoughts, but it basically boiled down to trying a bunch of stuff, recognizing what works and doing more of it, and having enough humility to let go of what doesn’t.

I think that approach is basically true for football teams, too. Anybody can win one game. Enough weird stuff can happen on a given NFL weekend that just about anybody can beat anybody. Last week’s Packers game is a good example of how that works. If Matthew Stafford is healthy, the dynamics of that game change considerably, but Brett Rypien couldn’t get it done, and so the Rams were more or less sunk before the game even kicked off.

The Packers, for their part, did enough to win that game. You’re only responsible for beating the team you’re actually playing against, and the Packers weren’t matched up against some hypothetical Stafford-led Rams team. They got the Rypien Rams, and they beat them.

But, to mix our metaphors, all that amounts to is one day of talk radio. Now they’ve got to do it again.

Or, since this was their third win, they have to prove that they can actually build on their success. They haven’t yet strung together consecutive victories with Jordan Love as their starting quarterback, but if they can use last week’s win as any kind of a jumping-off point, this might be the time. They’ve shown they can do it once — now it’s time to do it again.

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