Disfunction at Packerland.. By: Steven Ruiz | April 4, 2019 12:08 pm
If you haven’t had a chance to read Bleacher Report’s deep dive into the Aaron Rodgers – Mike McCarthy relationship, go do so now. It is chock-full of details you’d expect from a soap-opera plot, like McCarthy attempting to solve the Rodgers family rift by suggesting Aaron give his mother a call.
Here’s the main takeaway from Tyler Dunne’s piece: McCarthy’s offensive system was adequate for a time and allowed Rodgers’ prodigious talent to flourish. But then it grew stale and McCarthy never updated his playbook which led Rodgers — whose play on the field afforded him a ton of pull of it — to start taking liberties with his coach’s play designs. Rodgers started improvising more and more which led to conflict between him and McCarthy.
It’s easy to take Rodgers’ side in all of this. After all, he’s the transcendent quarterback who routinely makes the impossible look possible. And McCarthy looks like the bumbling fool whose outdated offense was holding Rodgers back and depriving us of even greater highlights. But make no mistake: Rodgers, as talented as he is, was just as much of a problem as McCarthy’s uninspired play-calling, at times. His refusal to work within the structure of the offense created as many problems as it did solutions.
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There weren’t a lot of examples of a Packers play design freeing up a receiver and putting him in a dangerous position, but Rodgers didn’t always take advantage of those opportunities when they came along.
Tom Brady is making that throw.
But maybe Rodgers would be more inclined to work within the system if the system was consistently providing him with good options — as New England’s system provides for its quarterback. Brady has said it himself, via ESPN:
Brady said that if Rodgers had the Patriots’ offensive system and exhaustive knowledge of opposing defenses, “He’d throw for 7,000 yards every year. He’s so much more talented than me.”
The number may not be 7,000, but Rodgers would shatter records if he was gifted with competent coaching over the course of his career. I hardly doubt Rodgers would have this opinion of Bill Belichick…
“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.”
We can’t put Green Bay’s illogical play-calling all on McCarthy, though. Some of it falls on Rodgers, who, according to one of B/R’s sources, was changing calls at the line “a third” of the time. Fans criticized McCarthy for not feeding RB Aaron Jones the ball enough, but, according to the source, Rodgers checked out a lot of runs. Former Packers RB Ryan Grant, who defends Rodgers in the piece (for the most part), agreed that Rodgers checking out of runs had been something he took issue with himself.
When those at-the-line play-calls don’t work, it’s not Rodgers getting the blame. We as fans are not privy to the calls being made and what adjustments have been called, so the public blames McCarthy for his nonsensical play designs or receivers are blamed for running the wrong route. Here’s an example mentioned in the B/R story…
On one play in New England, Rodgers told [Equanimeous] St. Brown to run a post route when the play called for a flag (an outbreaking route run where the receiver starts vertical then runs, at an angle, toward the pylon). St. Brown ran the post, and pressure forced Rodgers to throw the ball away toward the flag—leading his position coach to grill him on what he was thinking.
St. Brown told him he was “improvising” so he didn’t upset Rodgers.
Knowing what was up, McCarthy told him to stick with the routes called.
And here’s the play…
With St. Brown lined up outside of the numbers to start, the spacing isn’t great for a flag route, and with the Patriots playing without a safety in the deep middle, you can understand Rodgers’ thinking. But he didn’t follow up with his own adjustment, and who got the blame? Not Rodgers, who called the audible. Not McCarthy, who called a bad play. It was the rookie receiver getting chewed out for just following orders. McCarthy knew Rodgers made the change and instead of telling his quarterback to “stick with the routes called,” he said it to a guy trying his best to keep his Hall of Fame quarterback happy.
Rodgers may have been going rogue too often, but McCarthy allowed this to happen. He created the monster that eventually chewed him up and spit him out. And he has himself to blame. Grant put it best, with an analogy straight out of a science-fiction horror…
“When you put a quarterback in a position and you talk about how cerebral he is and you give him flexibility to make some changes, guess what? … You develop A.I., because it has the capacity to run without you. And then when it runs without you, it’s like, ‘Wait a minute!’ But in the same breath, if you’re not actually able to stay ahead of it, it’s going to outthink you and it’s going to say, ‘Me making the decision is the better decision.'”
So who do you blame? The rogue A.I. or the person who created it? The obvious answer is “both.”
You can read Tyler Dunne's entire piece here
