You’ve heard the rumors. Green Bay Packers coach Mike McCarthy is considering giving up his play calling duties and shuffling his offensive staff.
If this scenario plays out, offensive coordinator Tom Clements would reportedly become associate head coach and take over the play calling duties. We’ll note that, despite some places reporting this as a done deal, there’s been no official word that it’s a done deal. In fact, word out of Green Bay on Monday was that McCarthy was still evaluating his assistants.
Whether it’s a done deal or not isn’t important for this discussion though. The fact that McCarthy is considering this move raises a number of questions. The most prominent of those being, why now?
There are a number of possible answers and as we are wont to do, we’re going to speculate about every damn one of them.
First, however, it should be noted that there’s really nothing wrong here. It isn’t as if the Packers offense has gone backwards, suddenly failed to score points or fallen to the bottom half of the league in the telling offensive rankings.
In 2014, the Packers were sixth in total yards and first in scoring. In 2013, they were third and eighth in those categories while starting four different quarterbacks. In fact, the Packers offense has never ranked outside of the top 10 in both of those categories since McCarthy became head coach in 2006.
There have been years where they’ve been outside the top 10 one of those two categories, but never both as long as McCarthy has been at the helm. In other words, the Packers have been able to move the football consistently well for nine seasons in a row now.
So what gives?
The knee-jerk reaction
It seems a lot of people are assuming the NFC Championship game debacle is the root cause of this potential change. McCarthy took a lot of abuse after the game for being too conservative, some of which came from his own quarterback. Was it deserved? Not in my mind. McCarthy’s game plan should have won that game exactly as it was. It was undone by lack of execution and, to a greater extent, a subpar performance by the one guy who can’t have a subpar performance in a big game like that — Aaron Rodgers.
Still, this was a meltdown for the ages. It’s a game you’re constantly going to be asked about and reminded of. The Packers had a Super Bowl-caliber team and that makes the disappointment all the more bitter. So clearly something has to change, right? McCarthy canned special teams coach Shawn Slocum and now he’s falling on the sword himself (kind of).
We’re not buying that. McCarthy isn’t a knee-jerk reaction kind of guy. He constantly talks about the Packers program. He has rigid systems in place for everything. If anyone thinks firing Slocum was only the result of the NFC Championship game, they haven’t been watching the Packers special teams for a while. This was a unit that finished last in the NFL in 2014. That move was based on a body of work (a really crappy one) and was not at all reactionary. This one isn’t either.
Greater oversight
It has been suggested that if McCarthy weren’t so focused on the offense, he would have noticed little things that would have made a difference in the NFC Championship game. Things like Clay Matthews standing around pretending he had an injury at the end of the game and Slocum calling a field goal block up 16-0. McCarthy didn’t even seem to be aware of the former situation after the game and left the latter call entirely up to Slocum.
Great leaders typically lead one of two ways. They’re involved in every decision down to the tiniest detail or they surround themselves with great people and delegate. I think we can all agree that McCarthy hasn’t surrounded himself with great people. He’s surrounded himself with some good people and some not so good people. Often, delegating to those people has led to disastrous results. So the alternative is to become more involved in what everyone is doing and the way to do that is to hand off the play calling responsibilities to someone else.
This scenario makes a lot more sense. But it still looks like a knee-jerk reaction, you say?
No it doesn’t. Around this time last year, the Packers had just lost in the playoffs to the San Francisco 49ers for what seemed like the 30th time. We were all talking about how the defense couldn’t get it done AGAIN. Some people were calling for defensive coordinator Dom Capers’ head. Instead of firing Capers, which would have been a knee-jerk reaction, McCarthy decided he was going to pay some attention to the defense for once. He vowed then that he would be more involved in the defense moving forward and that the defense would improve.
It took half a season, but improve it did. The Packers finished 15th in total defense and 13th in scoring defense in 2014. They improved 10 and 11 spots, respectively, from 2013.
The coaching tree
McCarthy has openly questioned why his assistants don’t get to interview for more head coaching jobs. Thus far, Dolphins coach Joe Philbin is the only NFL limb on the Mike McCarthy coaching tree and his branch isn’t looking real sturdy at the moment.
Well Mike, the reason is pretty simple. First of all, no one’s getting a head job off your defensive staff, so let’s just throw that notion out the window. But more importantly, your offensive coordinator is an offensive coordinator in name only.
What does that person do? He doesn’t call the plays. He doesn’t run the offense. That’s what you do, Mike. The Packers offensive coordinator position, up to this point, is kind of like a glorified personal assistant. You make sure guys show up on time, you make sure they don’t miss their bus, you run them through some drills, you pat the occasional ass and say, “Good job.”
That guy doesn’t have ownership of anything.
The best way to get other teams to look at your offensive staff, if you really are interested in these guys getting a shot at running their own teams, is to let them run part of yours.
McCarthy has been in Green Bay for nine seasons. Guys always say they don’t think about their legacy, but that’s poppycock. You can’t tell me Bill Walsh didn’t smile every time someone mentioned his coaching tree or Mike Holmgren doesn’t get all warm and fuzzy when someone mentions his. McCarthy has talked about his coaching career being half over.
If he wants to go down as one of the greats, the legacy dictates he birth more head coaches into the NFL.
Self reflection
We’re never going to know what sort of impact losing his younger brother Joe right after the season had on McCarthy. What we can say is that death makes people reassess their priorities.
Last offseason, McCarthy wanted to be the Packers head coach for years to come. A lot has changed since then.
We’re not suggesting that McCarthy would up and retire. What we are suggesting is that maybe he wants to spend more time with his family or that maybe his long-term plans aren’t so certain anymore. Maybe he wants to make sure the Packers are left in a good position if something were to happen to him.
Again, we’ll never be able to say for sure how this tragedy affected McCarthy, but it would be naive to think it didn’t change his thinking at all.
It’s a copycat league
Yeah, you’ve heard that tired expression over and over, but it still remains true. If you look around the NFL, not many head coaches call their own plays on a full-time basis. You’ve got Chip Kelly in Philadelphia and Bill O’Brien in Houston. Maybe Sean Payton in New Orleans?
Other than that, I’m drawing a blank.
Neither of the Super Bowl teams have head coaches who call plays. The Dallas Cowboys stripped head coach Jason Garrett of his play calling duties after the 2013 season and handed them to offensive coordinator Scott Linehan. The Cowboys promptly improved from 8-8 to 12-4.
If the majority of the league does something a certain way, well, they’re probably on to something.
Certainly McCarthy is aware of this trend. Certainly he’s discussed it with other head coaches. Certainly there are benefits of doing it that way.
This point probably goes right back to greater oversight. And it probably takes us to this.
It’s just time
We highly doubt McCarthy is going to take us through his thought process on this topic. If change comes to pass, we’ll likely get a nice prepackaged quote from the Packers about self-evaluation and the best thing for the team.
This really isn’t something that has come out of nowhere, though. While this is the furthest the process has ever gotten (at least publicly), McCarthy has said that he thinks about giving up play calling after every season.
“Oh yeah, I think about it,” McCarthy said. “I go through the evaluation period after every season. I go through every responsibility, not only for myself but of the assistant coaches and how we’re tailoring responsibility to the players. I mean, that’s a huge part of my job – to make sure responsibility is clear, detailed, and everybody is on the same page, starting with myself.”
Kind of like Brett Favre hanging up the cleats. He thinks about it and then ends up not going through with it.
But he has thought about it. He was bound to pull the trigger one of these times.
6 Comments
Mike has to be careful here, ten years in one place. Players start tuning long time coaches out around this time.
a little shake up is good..im sure this will not amount to as much as it seems at first take…i wish it were more of a defensive staff shake-up….also…not one “fuck” or “dickhead” or “buffoon” in the article…NICE….
I’m going with three ideas.
1. McCarthy trusts turning over ‘his’ offense to Clements.
2. McCarthy realizes that w/o play calling responsibilities, Clements isn’t likely to get a look at a HC opportunity.
3. McCarthy’s doing what every good exec must become good at. Realizing there’s more weight in being an impresario to the whole show rather than a featured player in it.
Savage I like #3 and I hope its got merit; that would show a shift in MM’s thinking. Maybe the death of his Brother did have a large effect on him….
One thing for sure, McCarthy would never make a move that he believes might have an adverse effect on the Packer organization. For that reason I do not bite on the coaching tree theory. If McCarthy believes certain coaches taking on more responsibility will help the team win then he will pull the trigger. If not I believe McCarthy could care less about his legacy as it relates to coaching trees.
McCarthy will not make a knee jerk reaction, for that reason I do not go for the copycat approach. Sure the last three Super Bowl champs have head coaches that do not call plays, however I believe four of the previous five Super Bowl winners called their own plays.
I believe the greater oversight theory is part of the reason for the rumored change. The greater oversight is on the front burner because of the Seattle game and for good reason. The problem with oversight has been simmering for years, but hell, how can you not bring that problem to the front burner after Seattle.
A loss of a family member is very hard especially when that family member is younger than you. Not only do you reflect on many aspects of your life, you can have close family members and friends advise you in very strong ways of changes that you should make in your life style. I think the loss of McCarthy’s brother and greater oversight are the overriding factors in the potential changes.
It is not like the Packers are politicians that float ideas to glean public opinion. They could care less what we think. Why did the internal discussions (if they truly occurred)
regarding a new play caller, and offensive staff promotions get leaked? If the changes are really going to occur, and the Packers were the Corleone family, someone should be getting whacked for leaking family business.
People are going tonwant to say this is a knee jerrk reaction to the NFC Championship Game. But they haven’t been watching for the last decade. Mike McCarthy has been doing this his entire tenure of play calling. It was just on full display to a national audience during that game. It was undeniable. He took his greatest assets, Rodgers and the Offense out of the game multiple times during that game and then went into a prevent D in the fourth quarter then played to tie the game with time and timeouts left. He’s done this kind of thing many times before. This is a move that should have occurred 5 or 6 years ago.