No, Mike McCarthy Wasn't to Blame for the Devastating Packers Loss

About 15 months ago, I asked Bob Ryan if he would want to be a sportswriter if he were coming out of college today. He said no. He felt that the negativity that moves the needle in talk radio has permeated into every medium, and he wanted no part of that. “There’s a whole generation of big sports fans now who are trained to think automatically about what just went wrong rather than what just went right,” he said.

Fast forward to this weekend, when the Packers lost a heartbreaker in Arizona. It was the second straight year that Green Bay had a strong game plan to beat a team it was objectively not as good as, on the road. Late miscues, unfortunate bounces, and Larry Fitzgerald conspired to personally jam a butcher’s knife in my side.

In a hedgy column for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Gary D’Amato wondered if this and other Packers playoff failures were Mike McCarthy’s fault, and whether they’d have more than one Super Bowl in the past decade if they were coached by Bill Belichick. To address the first question, no, at least not this specific loss, and as far as the second goes: If the MJS replaced D’Amato with Peter King or Bill Simmons, would it sell more subscriptions?

Probably, yes, but it’s not as though this was a reasonable comparison. Alternatives to Mike McCarthy are Coordinator and/or Retread X, all of whom would have, by my estimation, at least an 85% chance at having less success than Green Bay has had during their head coach’s tenure.

The Packers were without their four top receivers from training camp—Jordy Nelson, Ty Montgomery, Davante Adams, and Randall Cobb—and save for one drive late that included a sure interception dropped by Sam Shields (his third of the night) and a fluky touchdown reception on a tipped ball, the Packers had largely contained the Cardinals. And again, this is who they were playing with:

It’s a testament to McCarthy that, several weeks ago when the offense was stagnant, he overrode Aaron Rodgers’ apparent preference of keeping Tom Clements calling the plays. In the way he beamed after beating Washington and complimented the coach in defeat on Saturday, Rodgers offered tacit acknowledgement that this was the correct decision.

Now, I don’t want to minimize how much this loss sucked. Sitting here typing this on Monday morning, I still haven’t changed out of the clothes I wore to bed on Saturday. It’s the second straight year that, despite outplaying a better team (by my eyes, anyway), the Packers are eliminated. And don’t think it hasn’t dawned on me that Aaron Rodgers’ biological clock is ticking.

Nevertheless, I don’t get why this has to be someone’s fault. This wasn’t Seattle where there were four quarters of aggravating conservative play. The Packers lost a coin toss, and then Carson Palmer and Larry Fitzgerald, two of the great players of this generation, found a hole in a zone blitz and now everything sucks. This wasn’t the Packers’ year, but everybody who watched the team in November and December knew that already.

Mike McCarthy cannot be conflated with Bill Belichick, but this loss wasn’t his fault, and he isn’t going anywhere. As a Packers fan, I can’t be terribly disappointed about that.