A bunch of people won't like Bob's article and what it implies but he has some valid points and some that several members here have been asking for 3 plus years...
This column has nothing to do with the size, speed, athletic ability, intelligence quotient, level of execution or years of experience on a football team.
It is about a critical dimension of the game that bubbles just below the surface every Sunday in the National Football League but probably isn’t discussed often enough.
Let’s delve into the degree of effort that Green Bay Packers, as a whole, have exhibited through the first five games of the 2018 season.
When Ron Wolf was in the midst of his Hall of Fame career as the Packers’ general manager from 1991-’01, he would watch games from the press box. In an interview, Wolf acknowledged not knowing what the effort level was for individual players and the team until the film could be watched the following day.
“How do you know they’re just not going through the motions?” Wolf said Thursday. “You don’t know. One looking at it doesn’t know, either. I don’t know how you say, ‘This guy’s trying and this guy’s not.’”
His point is well taken. But then the tape becomes available and learned football men like LeRoy Butler can begin to determine who played hard and who didn’t.
“You gauge if a team is playing hard by the (number of) guys away from the ball that are chasing,” said Butler, one of the Packers’ greatest defensive backs and currently an analyst for WSSP Radio Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“On offense, if you see at least three linemen down the field on a pass play, they are busting their butt. Not a run play, a pass play, and these guys are just on a dead sprint. They don’t know if the receiver is going to fumble the ball. They may be there to recover it. Also, if their quarterback gets sacked, they sprint over there to get him off the ground. Love each other. Stuff like that.
“On defense, you know guys are jacked and playing hard when you see seven guys around the ball. Four guys may fall down. They may get clipped, may get bumped by the referee, could be injured.”
In his media role, Butler maintains relationships with players and coaches. In some cases, he continues to serve as a mentor for players.
Butler estimated that during his career, which lasted from 1990-’01, 80% of the guys he had as teammates played hard. Today, he pegs that number at 35%, and has no doubt he’s correct.
“I can show you tape all day long,” Butler said. “It’s terrible. ‘He didn’t throw it to my guy so I’m not going to bust it over there.’”
Does the 100th team in Green Bay play hard?
“As far as finish? Chasing and busting? Playing all-out?” Butler said after a long moment of reflection. “It may be too early to know right now. You’ve got to give (Mike) Pettine at least eight games the way he wants them to do it.”
Pettine, of course, is the first-year defensive coordinator in Green Bay.
When the Packers of the 1990s would break for the summer after the post-draft minicamp, Mike Holmgren remembered Wolf saying to him, “OK, I’m passing the baton. They’re all yours.”
Wolf maintained that most players could be ready to play depending on how they were led. The head coach, in his opinion, had to set the tone for the team.
“There’s some truth to that,” Holmgren said Thursday from his home in Kirkland, Wash. “I loved it. I can’t overstate that enough. Setting the tone for what you want your organization to be.
“Look. I had some idiots, some ding-a-lings on the team. It was my job, along with the coaches, to reform them if I saw (laziness). If it was flat not happening, yeah, they’ve got to go. There’s no place for you.”
The willingness of players to compete to the best of their abilities separated teams, according to Holmgren.
“I used to tell them, ‘You’re not going to win every single battle, unless you’re Reggie White or someone,’” he said. “But not to hustle and not to try hard? Not to give it everything you have so you left something on the field? No, you don’t do that.
“You’re a professional athlete. This is how you play the game effort-wise. I understand if a guy gets beat on a play. If it’s an effort issue, that’s not acceptable.”
At mid-week, I contacted the widely-respected personnel director for an NFC team that watches tape each week of probably every game in the NFL. My request was simple and direct: “Please mention some teams that you think are playing their ass off right now”
Of the seven teams the executive listed minus any elaboration, it was interesting that five were from the AFC. Also, he didn’t mention his own club.
His selections were the Los Angeles Rams, the Cleveland Browns, the Tennessee Titans, the Jacksonville Jaguars, the New Orleans Saints, the Cincinnati Bengals and the Kansas City Chiefs.
Entering Sunday, six of those teams held at least a share of the lead in their division. The only club without a winning record was the Browns (2-2-1).
Three teams – New Orleans with Sean Payton, Cincinnati with Marvin Lewis and Kansas City with Andy Reid – have veteran coaches. Among the others, Cleveland with Hue Jackson and Jacksonville with Doug Marrone have coaches in their third seasons, the Rams have Sean McVay in his second season and Tennessee has Mike Vrabel in his first season.
The Packers were among the 25 teams that weren’t listed. There’s little evidence to think they should have been, either.
In a review of Aaron Rodgers’ 16 sacks, the tape shows teammates offering Rodgers a hand to lift him six times and clambering up himself six times when help wasn’t offered (four were inconclusive). Offering assistance were Lane Taylor three times, Bryan Bulaga twice and David Bakhtiari once.
Some offensive coaches, especially line coaches, are adamant that blockers must get the quarterback off the ground. Holmgren wasn’t one of them but he remembered it transpiring all the time when Brett Favre was under center.
“It absolutely happened because they cared about him as much as any player I’ve ever coached,” said Holmgren.
Other coaches demand that players not only hustle downfield on running plays but gather up the ball carrier after he’s down.
In the opener against Chicago Jamaal Williams rushed eight times in the first half. Williams might be one of the more physical running backs in the league but that didn’t seem to matter because his linemen pulled him up on just one of the eight.
That was a contrast from the Detroit-New England game Sept. 23 at Ford Field when guard T.J. Lang and center Graham Glasgow were like mother hens after almost all of rookie Kerryon Johnson’s carries. With Lang sidelined, Glasgow kept it up against the Packers.
Lang gave that extra effort for most of his eight-year career in Green Bay. Josh Sitton, Frank Winters and Marco Rivera were obvious examples of other Packers offensive linemen that consistently helped up teammates and pushed away defenders.
Joe Philbin coached Rivera and Sitton during his first stint in Green Bay. Back now as offensive coordinator, Philbin doesn’t like some of what he has seen from the current offense. In fact, the extra effort expended by Byron Bell in two starts for injured Justin McCray might have played a substantial role why he’s now the starting right guard.
“The thing we really liked about (Bell) and an area that we wanted to emphasize last week and we want to continue to do is he did a great job getting around the football and hustling down the field and helping his teammates off the ground and playing the play to the whistle,” Philbin said 10 days ago. “That’s something that we want … to get our play speed up a little bit more than we have in the past.”
Neither tight end Jimmy Graham nor defensive end Muhammad Wilkerson, general manager Brian Gutekunst’s two major free-agent acquisitions in March, have contributed much to the fabric of the team. Graham has been aloof on and off the field; he’s big on look-at-me thrusts of his arms after making a catch but can’t be bothered with picking up a teammate. Wilkerson, who went on injured reserve Sept. 29, seemed more interested in his next contract than giving of himself to the team.
When Marquez Valdes-Scantling caught the first touchdown pass of his career in Detroit, you’d think someone would be jumping all over him. Yes, a two-point conversion attempt was coming, but the officials would have provided time for a mini-celebration. Instead, MVS got one low five on his way back to the huddle.
Without question, the role of the quarterback is paramount on how an offense conducts itself on game days and during the week.
Favre was just one of the boys for much of his career. Everyone remembers him gallivanting to the end zone and leaping into the arms of the touchdown-maker.
Wolf said having pre-eminent leaders with Favre on offense and Butler on defense proved invaluable for the Packers’ powerhouse teams of the 1990s. Center Jim Otto and guard Gene Upshaw were the same way in Oakland, Wolf said.
“Oh, my God,” Butler said. “Everybody loved him. People wanted to do more for Brett. Brett used to be embarrassed being on TV. He didn’t want to do commercials (early in his career). He never said stuff like, ‘I want to be the best of all-time.’ He wanted his teammates to like him.”
If football were a chess game, Rodgers would be the grandmaster confident of making all the right moves. If it was pro basketball, Rodgers might be Michael Jordan to Favre’s LeBron James.
For some of this season Rodgers has come across as petulant, detached, bitchy weeks after becoming the NFL’s highest-paid player in history at $33.5 million per year. Maybe there’s a reason why his teammates don’t lift him onto his feet.
The esprit de corps and unselfishness that become evident when offenses in the NFL are clicking has been missing in Green Bay. On the practice field in August and in the bench area on Sunday, Mike McCarthy is the immobile man glued to his headset and play card and contributing almost nothing to the energy level.
Only one team in the league has seen its opponents fumble fewer times than the three by the Packers’ foes. Chicago’s Mitch Trubisky fumbled twice on sacks, once because he bumped into his man. Buffalo’s Josh Allen had the other on a scramble. Of the two that went to Green Bay, Kenny Clark forced one and recovered both.
The Packers recovered an average of nine fumbles in the last five seasons. But last year the Packers tied for 20th in turnover differential under McCarthy at minus-3, and through five games this season they’re even worse in a tie for 23rd at minus-2.
“Yeah, I talked about the giveaways and takeaways in depth today in the team meeting,” McCarthy said Thursday. “We’ve created too many giveaways opportunities and we clearly don’t have enough takeaway opportunities.
“That comes down to the pursuit and finish and covering the football and the mechanics of it … we’ve definitely got to do a better job of getting that ball out.”
Has the defense in Green Bay been remiss when it comes to, as Butler put it, getting “seven guys to the ball?” It appears to be the case.
Clark, by far, has been the best player on defense. Of the others on defense, rookie Jaire Alexander might be the next most impressive when it comes to chase and supporting teammates. It certainly looks as if Alexander is into the team.
From my perspective, I don’t see that gang-tackling gusto and camaraderie the best defenses in Green Bay have had. Too often, someone makes a play or a tackle and teammates don’t acknowledge it. Those examples of maximum pursuit on defense that can be obvious have been few and far between.
Late last month, Pettine said, “Overall, I think as an entire defense, our level of physicality needs to be higher.”
The week before that, pass-game coordinator Joe Whitt told reporters, “We need a bunch of tough, mean guys running around hitting people and turning them away from the ball.”
Over the years Mike Daniels might have been the most verbose important player on defense but it appeared as if Ha Ha Clinton-Dix represented the heartbeat of the operation. I’ve just never been sure how committed Clinton-Dix is to the team and doing all that winning demands. Watch Detroit’s Glover Quin to see an unselfish veteran safety that’s all in for his team and apparently a natural team leader.
Holmgren had an incredible squadron of leaders (Butler, Favre, Winters, White, Eugene Robinson, George Koonce) to make the operation go. Holmgren recalled occasions when he was walking over to unload on some unit between series and by the time he arrived the players had handled it themselves and he turned back without saying a word.
“A coach can instill emotion in a team, and I think you do,” he said. “But I think, really, the most effective way is for it to come from the players themselves. Players know if the effort’s right. And it’s OK for players to get after (each other) as long as they understand everybody loves everybody.”
Despite his exceptional performance level and exertion, Clark probably is too soft-spoken to be a true leader now. At this point, I’m not sure there’s a player to whom McCarthy could turn to address the sensitive but crucial issues of teammates loafing or not being with the program.
There’s a different vibe in Green Bay these days, that’s for sure, and it’s one that might jeopardize the long season ahead.
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