2018 Green Bay Packers Season Thread: 6-9-1: Mike McCarthy Fired, Philbin Interim HC

[OldSchoolSnapper]

Yeah, I was going to say, but you beat me to it. The offense was just fine in 2016. It was on fire at the end of the season.

 

On the subject of Hundley, while we're at it, this mess has made me wonder if the guy was actually all that bad. They look like the same team they were with him running the show last year.

[homer]

LOL. Winston Moss fired.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

Moss being on the staff is honestly one of the most damning things agaisnt McCarthy. The guy sounds like an absolute dope, can't compose a sentence without typos or grammatical errors, has no professionalism whatsoever and the temperament of a small child. I cannot believe that guy was an associate head coach of an NFL team.

 

Very weird he felt the need to add Rodgers specifically to that tweet. And why is tweeting anyway? Sure seems odd for an NFL coach to be doing that midseason. Good on Philbin for putting that dog down.

[pacopete4]

[sarcasm]Rodgers continues to be a coach killer.[/sarcasm]

[superfly]

Deck chairs....Titanic...

[OldSchoolSnapper]

Jeez, as somebody that whiffs on these things every year and whose fantasy football team can't seem to ever win 6 games, I'm on some kind of roll this year. I had the Brewers losing in the NLCS and pretty much nailed this:

 

viewtopic.php?f=156&t=36339&start=240

 

I might as well go out now and say I like the Bucks to make the ECF.

[JosephC]

Packers new front office directory.

 

Team President = Aaron Rodgers

General Manager = Aaron Rodgers

Head Coach = Aaron Rodgers

Chief Executive Lapdog = Mark Murphy

Personnel Lapdog = Brian Gutekunst

Operations Lapdog = Russ Ball

[OldSchoolSnapper]

I don't get that narrative at all. Like 95% of the state wanted McCarthy fired so why is it because Rodgers wanted it? It seems pretty likely other guys did too. Listening to them speak, I don't get the sense at ALL that Murphy and BK are in Rodgers's pocket. Murphy was pretty assertive when he said Aaron wouldn't be in the coach-hiring discussion. Neither one comes off to me as a pushover.

 

Honestly, I think it's pretty telling that after Rodgers has been blasted by numerous loose cannons, like Jennings, Finley, Moss, his own family, etc., he has never aired out his dirty laundry publicly. That's an incredible amount of restraint, especially considering a guy like Jennings who has built his 2nd career completely on the back of bashing Aaron Rodgers.

 

All I can see from these episodes is that Rodgers, large ego not withstanding, has a level of maturity these guys do not.

[pacopete4]

Maybe it is Murphy's ego that is the problem?

[PeaveyFury]

Maybe it is Murphy's ego that is the problem?

 

Maybe there isn’t actually a problem? I don’t know why so many people are on Murphy or Rodgers here. They’ve made it clear that Gute will have input on the hire, and Rodgers won’t be involved in the process.

 

Until they’ve proven that they’ve screwed those up, don’t they at least deserve the chance to let the process play out?

[OldSchoolSnapper]

Maybe it is Murphy's ego that is the problem?

 

Maybe there isn’t actually a problem? I don’t know why so many people are on Murphy or Rodgers here. They’ve made it clear that Gute will have input on the hire, and Rodgers won’t be involved in the process.

 

Until they’ve proven that they’ve screwed those up, don’t they at least deserve the chance to let the process play out?

 

There is where I am. The chickens came home to roost on a bunch of bad contracts. It was, without fan goggles, a fairly predictable outcome before the season.

[homer]

McCarthy getting a one year deal was the writing on the wall.

[bjkrautk]

Maybe it is Murphy's ego that is the problem?

 

Maybe there isn’t actually a problem? I don’t know why so many people are on Murphy or Rodgers here. They’ve made it clear that Gute will have input on the hire, and Rodgers won’t be involved in the process.

 

Until they’ve proven that they’ve screwed those up, don’t they at least deserve the chance to let the process play out?

 

There is where I am. The chickens came home to roost on a bunch of bad contracts. It was, without fan goggles, a fairly predictable outcome before the season.

 

This is largely where I come down on the subject as well, with the slight caveat that I do not feel this team's performance was altogether predictable. Injuries to significant players (Wilkerson, Daniels, Bulaga, Cobb, King, and that Rodgers guy), under-performance by other players (Perry, Matthews, Clinton-Dix, Josh Jones, Graham, Crosby, Montgomery, Rodgers, etc.), an inability to generate turnovers, the odd refusal to give carries to Aaron Jones, and the necessity of relying on rookie WRs to incorporate into the offense are not things which could be collectively predicted without the benefit of hindsight.

 

While it's fair to predict a fair number of those events could have happened, the lofty expectations coming into the season were due to most prognosticators doing just the opposite. If just Mason Crosby makes a few more kicks, this team is 6-6 (if not better), and still in the hunt for a playoff spot....just with its flaws a bit less exposed than they are now. As it is, they're a team which found an astonishing variety of ways to lose winnable football games.

[homer]

As for a rebuild, the soft rebuild started the day Gute was hired.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

In that first bracket of players you mentioned, only Daniels is really a surprise. Cobb is always hurt and a vastly overrated player; I was calling for his release last summer, many have been on him for a while. King has been nothing but an OK hurt player. Rodgers, at this point, can't be called surprising when he gets hurt. Bulaga is done. Wilkerson was a total crapshoot entering the year.

 

In the second group, many of those guys did not underperform. They did what they have done for years, be average or worse on bloated deals. But I don't see any of their seasons as surprising in the least.

 

Point is, you can do that here and there; we were doing it all over the roster. As I said, without fan goggles, it was easy to see they were hanging on by threads in a lot of different places.

 

You just sort of had the sense things were right on the verge of blowing up unless Rodgers went insane.

 

I still think they are close to a championship level again, just because the line between those two areas is paper thin when you have Rodgers.

[tmwiese55]

I'm basically with the last few posters. Just because the media wants drama doesn't mean there has to be something there. Sometimes things get stale after this many years. I'm sure Rodgers was frustrated just like everyone else. Doesn't mean there is some elaborate backstabbing drama bs situation going on. It's just time for a shake up with some new ideas, nothing wrong with that.

[pacopete4]

Maybe it is Murphy's ego that is the problem?

 

Maybe there isn’t actually a problem? I don’t know why so many people are on Murphy or Rodgers here. They’ve made it clear that Gute will have input on the hire, and Rodgers won’t be involved in the process.

 

Until they’ve proven that they’ve screwed those up, don’t they at least deserve the chance to let the process play out?

 

I agree with you but to me, Murphy listing his resume is about as ridiculous as the "I'm a highly successful coach" rant.

[homer]

In that first bracket of players you mentioned, only Daniels is really a surprise. Cobb is always hurt and a vastly overrated player; I was calling for his release last summer, many have been on him for a while. King has been nothing but an OK hurt player. Rodgers, at this point, can't be called surprising when he gets hurt. Bulaga is done. Wilkerson was a total crapshoot entering the year.

 

In the second group, many of those guys did not underperform. They did what they have done for years, be average or worse on bloated deals. But I don't see any of their seasons as surprising in the least.

 

Point is, you can do that here and there; we were doing it all over the roster. As I said, without fan goggles, it was easy to see they were hanging on by threads in a lot of different places.

 

You just sort of had the sense things were right on the verge of blowing up unless Rodgers went insane.

.

 

They didn't need Rodgers to go insane. They have lost 5 games by a touchdown or less (3 of those games were a field goal or less) and then there's the goofy tie against Minny. The defense has arguably been the best it's been in five or more years. They just needed a little more from the offense and they are probably sitting at 7 wins right now.

[MrTPlush]

Jeez, as somebody that whiffs on these things every year and whose fantasy football team can't seem to ever win 6 games, I'm on some kind of roll this year. I had the Brewers losing in the NLCS and pretty much nailed this:

 

viewtopic.php?f=156&t=36339&start=240

 

I might as well go out now and say I like the Bucks to make the ECF.

 

Might as well put it on your headstone

 

 

You also predicted 8-9 wins....so...

[OldSchoolSnapper]

So they are five Rodgers miracles away from being 9-2-1. Fans are always convinced a team is better than it is. Really, you can go up and down most bad team's schedules and make arguments for how close they are to contending. Fans of nearly every team do it every year. Very few are getting massacred week in and week out. Let's keep in mind one of their wins WAS a Rodgers miracle and they very nearly lost at home to the 2-10 Niners.

 

They're not good. They can't close out a game and have disappeared for quarters at a time. At every turning moment in almost every game, they fail...that's not hard luck, it's the mark of a team that hasn't learned how to win yet.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

Jeez, as somebody that whiffs on these things every year and whose fantasy football team can't seem to ever win 6 games, I'm on some kind of roll this year. I had the Brewers losing in the NLCS and pretty much nailed this:

 

viewtopic.php?f=156&t=36339&start=240

 

I might as well go out now and say I like the Bucks to make the ECF.

 

Might as well put it on your headstone

 

 

You also predicted 8-9 wins....so...

 

 

Sure, whatever. Since I know you'd be in the line 4-5 deep pointing it out nonstop if they'd gone 13-3, I don't really care. There are several guys in the thread using expressions like "stupid" and "good grief" when I insinuated a 4-win team with Rodgers was possible.

 

And for good measure...

 

I don't see them winning more than 9 games, possibly fewer, and I think Gute fires McCarthy and brings in his own guy, which he probably wants to do now but can't.

[homer]

You are the only one talking about miracles and insane play. They have five losses by a combined 24 points. You don't need miracles to overcome that point differential, you literally need to be just slightly better. Is that on Rodgers? Is that on McCarthy? Is that on the scheme? Is that because of rookie receivers? Probably a combination of everything.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

That's not really sound logic. They beat the Bears by 1. Was that not a miracle because it was close?

 

Rodgers is insane by default, that was my point. He so consistently goes down the field to get a FG or TD with 55 seconds left that it became an expectation. Except this year, that wasn't happening and you were left with what the Packers have been for some time, a mediocre to slightly below football team held up by one dude.

 

You keep harping on the 5 losses but don't mention the 49ers or Bears wins. The fact is this team isn't good. In 2008 they had 7 losses by 4 points or less and made the jump to 11-5 the next season. I think that is entirely possibly, but this year, they were not good and it was not bad luck. It was far too consistent to be bad luck.

[homer]

You keep harping on the 5 losses but don't mention the 49ers or Bears wins. The fact is this team isn't good. In 2008 they had 7 losses by 4 points or less and made the jump to 11-5 the next season. I think that is entirely possibly, but this year, they were not good and it was not bad luck. It was far too consistent to be bad luck.

 

OK they are 2 - 5- 1 in games decided by less than a touchdown. I'm not saying it was all bad luck but in one loss the kicker missed four field goals, in a tie our OLB was flagged for a penalty on the game deciding play that would not have been called three weeks later, in another loss a guy was supposed to take a knee and ended up fumbling a kick off return...so there has been SOME bad luck (and some good luck - the Bears defender dropped an INT). But taking luck out of the equation (which I never included anyway), you are still looking at a team that was very close to having 7 or 8 wins right now. They just needed to be slightly better on offense.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

Just went back to look at their schedule out of curiosity:

 

Redskins: 7

Vikings tie: 9

Rams: 17

Patriots: 7

Seahawks: 3

Vikings: 3

Cardinals: 7

 

Those are the Packers second-half point totals against those teams. So besides LAR, they were awful in all those games. To me, this is more indicative than "games decided by X points or less," because a couple of those games are pretty weak. They lost to DET by 8, but really got their teeth kicked in. In the last Vikings game, they're down 10 entering the 4th and end up losing by 7, but the outcome was never really in question and they pretty got dominated after the very beginning.

 

The second half is what happens after someone has a chance to adjust, IMO that's where separation really happens in most NFL games. Most games are still in question at halftime, and the Packers have been an atrocious 2H team this year.

 

I got more curious, so I wanted to see how they stack up quarter by quarter.

 

The Packers are actually one of the better 1Q offenses in the NFL, coming in 8th in scoring. But they drop to 21st in the 2nd, 14th in the 3rd and 20th in the 4th. For as often as they've been behind, that is pretty alarming for a team with Aaron Rodgers.

 

That would seem to support the idea that they are having big trouble with in-game adjustments. This is, in a way, my long-winded way of saying that I think their "close games" line is maybe a bit disingenuous. Adjustments are probably one of the bigger components of winning in the NFL, and they've been really bad at them.