My thoughts to a t.... Bravo Bob !
By BOB McGINN
By BOB McGINN
From May basically until the end of the season, the responsibility for the success or failure of the Green Bay Packers rests squarely on the shoulders of the head coach.
Mike McCarthy’s players showed how much they thought of him Sunday in the Packers’ desultory, careless and impotent 35-11 defeat at the hands of the Detroit Lions at Ford Field.
Blame Ted Thompson’s player procurement. Curse injuries. Vilify Dom Capers.
No matter what excuse one can find, McCarthy is paid somewhere between $8 and $9 million, is supported by management and has had a street named after him in order to outcoach supposedly inferior men and make it all work.
He basically controls the roster once the off-season program starts. He designs the offense and calls the plays. He plays a far larger role on defense than most realize.
He also has a captive audience, addressing the players and coaches once a day if not more with the message only he controls. He decides who plays and who doesn’t, and who continues to coach and who gets fired.
He determines how each minute of each practice is utilized. He arranges the schedule for the entire year.
On Sunday, after possibly the most disappointing season (7-9) of his 12-year career was in the books, McCarthy indirectly acknowledged that his methods failed him.
“I’m very disappointed,” McCarthy said. “Four turnovers. It’s garbage. You are what we’ve emphasized. Just the way we practice, how much work we put into it … and in the second half we played worse.”
Turnover differential, the foundation of McCarthy’s success, deserted him in 2017. The Packers finished minus-3 for the year, matching 2013 as his only seasons that finished in negative territory.
McCarthy has been so masterful in the most vital part of the game that his teams have turned the ball over four or more times in merely 13 of his 210 games. Problem is, three happened in the last seven weeks.
At the same time, the Packers went without a takeaway for the third game in a row. It’s another strike against the defense coached by McCarthy and coordinated by Capers, and for which Capers reportedly will be cashiered along with other assistant coaches.
McCarthy even felt the need to trumpet his team’s practice habits, although there’s no way to corroborate that because reporters are escorted off the premises by publicists each day after the first half an hour or so. “If there’s anything that is 100%,” he said, “it’s this team works.”
It sounded surreal to find McCarthy, who often comes across as high and mighty, on the defensive. It was all going to turn out so differently when Aaron Rodgers returned amid fanfare in Carolina only to play poorly in defeat before Brett Hundley was awful in the Minnesota shutout and the one-sided finale.
Since the hiring of Vince Lombardi in 1959 the franchise has lost its last three games only four times. Dan Devine did it in 1974, as did Bart Starr in 1980 and Lindy Infante in 1990. Now you can add McCarthy’s name to that august list.
The Lions (9-7) were playing for a winning season, a 5-1 record in the NFC North and their coach, Jim Caldwell, who reportedly will soon be axed. After a sluggish start they blew apart the Packers not only because they’re more talented but also because they were more inspired.
“I love who Coach Caldwell is as a person, as a coach, the leader he is, the Christian he is,” wide receiver Golden Tate. “I want him to say.”
In some way it was downhill for the Packers after the opening kickoff. Make that opening onside kick, a brilliant stratagem approved by McCarthy in which Mason Crosby’s boot was recovered adroitly by Jermaine Whitehead.
After converting two third-and-1’s, a bugaboo for Green Bay all season, Hundley gunned a third-and-6 in-breaking route to Jamaal Williams, who was flanked wide right in an empty formation covered by middle linebacker Jarrad Davis.
A running back isn’t the player you want running that route. Still, Williams beat Davis easily but then tried to make a body catch. It bounced from his chest to his fingers and then to the trailing Davis, who wound up with a gift interception at the Detroit 12.
A team functionary must have told McCarthy that the Packers dropped six passes. After having seven in the frigid night air of Lambeau Field a week earlier, this near-repeat wasn’t well-received.
“I don’t know, Larry, s—, we had four turnovers and we dropped balls,” McCarthy told radio analyst Larry McCarren afterward. “So it wasn’t a very good game for our offense.”
McCarthy detests giveaways even more. Perhaps toward that end, he almost seemed to be calling the game with turnover avoidance uppermost in his mind.
Not having Jordy Nelson (shoulder) in uniform made not a whit of difference. Being without Davante Adams (concussion) did.
His menagerie of receivers didn’t give McCarthy much confidence, and rightly so. He was content to bang with Williams and give Hundley short throws in the flats.
Alas, McCarthy was foiled again in the form of three additional giveaways: Hundley’s fumble on a strip at the Detroit 14, Donatello Brown’s unlucky fumble at the Green Bay 14 as he attempted to block for punt returner Trevor Davis, and Hundley’s give-up pick to Darius “Big Play” Slay at the end.
The Packers’ offensive line of position coach James Campen, missing its right-side starters, didn’t help by being responsible for four sacks, all of which came on third down. Three were by end Ziggy Ansah, who spent much of the day terrorizing right tackle Justin McCray, and two came on stunts.
It gave Campen and the offense a whopping 51 sacks for the third time in the last nine years; only twice in their annals have the Packers allowed more in a season.
Hundley, with 14 giveaways in his 10 games, finished with a passer rating of 70.6 and 270 yards rushing. The Packers settled for 256 yards, the fewest allowed by the Lions all season.
“There were great times, there were low moments,” Hundley said. “I’ve learned a lot through these eight, nine games and it’s something I’ll hold with me forever.”
It seems like ages ago but remember how Capers once had Matthew Stafford’s number?
In their first 10 head-to-head affairs Stafford completed just 58.5% of 419 passes for 6.8 yards per attempt, 18 touchdowns and 16 interceptions. Looking part puzzled and part chagrined, his passer rating after the first meting in 2015 stood at 77.4.
Since then, Capers has been the one without an answer. Counting his explosive work Sunday, Stafford’s last five-game numbers show a 68.7% completion mark in 179 throws for 9.1 per attempt, 12 TDs and three picks. Totally at ease nowadays reading Capers’ blitzes and bluffs, Stafford’s passer rating was 140.4 Sunday and 112.8 in their last five jousts.
The Packers’ defense broke a team record in 2017, one that says just about everything you need to know about the unit.
Opponents compiled a passer rating of 102.0, even higher than the previous mark of 95.9 that was shared by last year’s defense.
Another metric almost defies comprehension.
Green Bay’s defense allowed 46 possessions to reach the red zone. Of those 46, foes scored 30 touchdowns and 16 field goals.
Not one time did the Packers take the ball away inside the 20. Or shove the opponent back so far it had to punt. At the same time, Ron Zook’s special teams failed to block one of those field-goal attempts or pressure a kicker into a miss with a heavy rush.
The last team to allow 100% red-zone scoring for an entire season was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of 2008 in coach Jon Gruden’s last season. And, get this, the Packers were 32nd last year in red-zone scoring at 95.6%.
“We had some bad football plays,” McCarthy said. “Some bad mental mistakes, particularly by young guys.”
The Packers played without eight starters (the Lions were missing five), and when Damarious Randall took another surprise powder with a knee it was a grab-bag in the back end.
Stafford missed some open receivers early but it seemed only a matter of time before coordinator Jim Bob Cooter would get some receivers running free.
The first, a 58-yard post to Marvin Jones off two run fakes, set up the first of Matt Prater’s two field goals. When unreliable rookie Josh Jones, in the middle of the field, didn’t stay as deep as the deepest, Davon House couldn’t make a play on the wide receiver between the hashes.
With the score tied, 3-3, and the Lions facing third and 10, Stafford threw a 25-yard dart to Kenny Golladay over Blake Martinez, who wasn’t deep enough on his zone drop.
Golladay, a 6-4 talent drafted in the third round, proceeded to stiff-arm Ha Ha Clinton-Dix, who took a bad angle and then attempted to take on the rookie high. When neither Clinton-Dix nor Jones, who showed no awareness on the other side, showed urgency to chase, it was a 54-yard touchdown.
Stafford had never completed three passes for 50 yards or more in a game before his 71-yard TD to Tate late in the third quarter. Tate ran an over route behind Jake Ryan and Morgan Burnett as Marvin Jones cleared out House to the post.
Tate made the catch near the sideline in the clear at the 47. Again, Clinton-Dix didn’t really try to get over, and then Tate shrugged off a pathetic attempt to tackle by House near the 10.
Amazingly enough, the one thing the secondary had prevented this season was the long pass. Chicago’s Joshua Bellamy, in Game 9, had the longest TD of 46 yards. The longest pass of any kind was the 63-yard screen to Detroit’s Theo Riddick in Game 8.
The hits kept on coming, too. Jarrad Davis was wearing out Williams and blockers with his savage intensity finding the ball. Joe Marciano’s special teams covered like wild dogs. Detroit’s defensive backs were so much more physical than Green Bay’s.
So this, then, represented final indignity for McCarthy’s brutally bad defense.
“We just got to find a way to shore that up,” said Mike Daniels, knowing full well that pass rush (two sacks) is the best way to start.
Caldwell has 36 victories in four seasons but just one came by a margin larger than Sunday’s 24 points. It was the Lions’ first sweep of the Packers in 26 years.
“I mean, that’s a big deal,” safety Glover Quin said. “It was about getting the win. It was about sending a message.”
Some fans will say the Packers’ season would have been radically different if the 34-year-old Rodgers, who was 4-3 in seven starts, had played every game. It might have been, but the only quarterback in the NFC who has played better than the 29-year-old Stafford in the last two years has been Drew Brees.
McCarthy’s appeal to his team – “I expect everybody to do their job today and to represent the ‘G’ on their helmet” – went unheeded. His message and his team as a whole packed about as much punch as Barney Fife did in Mayberry.
