SAD TRAGIC: The Green Bay Packers’ former head coach died in a plane crash.
There had to be a tipping point somewhere. An incident, an argument, a defeat, a defining moment in Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy’s football marriage.
Anyone could see the Packers quarterback and head coach were on the verge of a divorce long before that inconceivable 20-17 loss to the lowly Cardinals in December, which eventually led to McCarthy’s dismissal. Rodgers’ death stares and defiance had been consistent for years by that point.
But how far back must you go to find the start of the end?
Was it Week 3 of the 2017 season when cameras caught Rodgers yelling at his coach, “Stupid fucking call!”
Back even further, to the NFC Championship Game on Jan. 18, 2015, when McCarthy coached like a sloth, calling for field goals from the 1-yard line twice in the first half and then running three times in the final five minutes to enrage his quarterback and effectively end a Super Bowl season?
Another longtime teammate agrees: “That was a large cancer in the locker room. It wasn’t a secret.”
Through all of the winning seasons, it might have been easy for casual observers to overlook this cancer. To mistake success for bliss and harmony and assume life was good between the two.
But even in the best of times—when confetti should’ve still been stuck to their clothing—one person who was then close to Rodgers remembers he would regularly call to vent that McCarthy didn’t have a clue what he was doing. He’d tell him that McCarthy frequently called the wrong play. That he used the wrong personnel. That they were running plays that worked one out of 50 times in practice. That McCarthy was a buffoon he was constantly bailing out.
“Mike has a low football IQ, and that used to always bother Aaron,” this source says. “He’d say Mike has one of the lowest IQs, if not the lowest IQ, of any coach he’s ever had.”
Adds a personnel man who worked for the Packers at the time: “He’s not going to respect you if he thinks he’s smarter than you.”
And then, as time moved on and the team plateaued, the facade fell away. Cracks in the foundation of this arranged marriage became impossible to ignore.
“You start arguing. You start losing. When the money’s bad, you argue,” says DuJuan Harris, a Packers running back from 2012 through 2014. “You start hating how somebody breathes. You start hating how somebody chews their food.”
Leaving behind what legacy? It’s not like the Packers were epic failures this last decade. McCarthy has a street named after him in the shadow of Lambeau Field. Rodgers is a future first-ballot Hall of Famer. The two made the playoffs together eight years in a row. But this should’ve been a Patriots-like reign. History. One former teammate says he thinks Rodgers should have won a minimum of six Super Bowl rings under McCarthy and that the 2011 team should be remembered like the ’72 Dolphins.
Instead, a surefire dynasty never was.
Instead, Rodgers is hoping to rise again at 35 years old, McCarthy is unemployed, and everyone else is left asking one question: What the hell happened?
Bleacher Report talked to dozens of players, coaches and personnel men who shared time in Green Bay with Rodgers and McCarthy in search of an answer.
Virtually all of them agree this era of Packers football is missing rings. Many rings. And sure, there’s blame to spread. Some cite former general manager Ted Thompson literally falling asleep in meetings by the end of his tenure. Some cite the defense’s innate ability to self-destruct each January.
But central to it all are the two Packers who lasted the longest.
McCarthy and Rodgers.
Where Jermichael Finley, a Packers tight end from 2008 to 2013, sees a self-entitled quarterback and bad leader, Grant thinks it’s idiotic for anyone to complain about such a transcendent talent. Where Greg Jennings, a Packers receiver from 2006 to 2012, sees Rodgers as an ultrasensitive source of toxicity, others lambast McCarthy for wasting a gift from the football gods.
One ex-Packers scout puts it on both. He describes Rodgers as an arrogant quarterback quick to blame everyone but himself—one who’s “not as smart as he thinks he is”—yet kindly points out that McCarthy basically quit on his team.
Nobody’s sure where Rodgers and the Packers will go from here. How long this next marriage with new head coach Matt LaFleur will last.
But one former teammate, lamenting this colossal what-if, makes one point on the past crystal clear.
“If you were going to write a headline,” he says, “that would be it right there: How Egos Took Down the Packers.“
At its peak, the Rodgers-McCarthy Packers offense carried a feeling of absolute certainty.
Coaches would try to build up opponents, and the players would chuckle inside. “We would literally say, ‘They can’t stop us,'” Grant says.
There was zero doubt.
Plays were simple and worked like clockwork. McCarthy identified and game-planned for endless mismatches. Defenses couldn’t double-team Jennings. Linebackers couldn’t guard Finley. Jordy Nelson was in unbreakable mindlock with Rodgers on back-shoulder throws. James Jones bullied corners. Randall Cobb added to the embarrassment of riches. And playing zone against Rodgers was like playing zone against the Golden State Warriors: a death sentence.
The cherry on top for Rodgers was ever-growing freedom to change plays at the line of scrimmage and an ever-growing propensity mid-play to wait, wait, wait for something grander to develop downfield.
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