Ever since Packers coach Mike McCarthy
gave up offensive play-calling duties, Green Bay’s defense was
communicating in ways Rodgers hadn’t heard before, showing increased
awareness to the reigning NFL MVP’s checks and signals at the line of scrimmage.
“I
started thinking, ‘Somebody must’ve told them something, because
there’s no way that they would say anything like that unless somebody
told them,’” Rodgers said in an interview last week with USA TODAY
Sports at his locker inside Lambeau Field. “Deductive reasoning told me that Mike probably went over there and gave away some of our secrets.”
About
two weeks later, McCarthy revealed his secret to the offense: He’d gone
into a defensive meeting and presented a list of clues, so to speak,
that would help the unit understand and compete with Rodgers and company
on a more level playing field in practice.
It wasn’t just a ploy
to challenge the best QB on the planet, though that’s certainly a
byproduct – one that makes Rodgers flash a bemused smirk and say he
feels like McCarthy is “a little bit of a double agent.”
This was
part of a broad re-envisioning of the program McCarthy has built over
nearly a decade in Green Bay that would start with raising every
player’s football IQ, at a time many would have looked at the results –
six straight playoff trips, one title, a collapse in Seattle away from
another Super Bowl trip in January – and said things were just fine the
way they were.
“And you’re ignorant, foolish, dumb as a rock to
think that,” McCarthy said. “If you don’t continue to try to get better,
improve yourself, you’re going to get your ass kicked.
“The
driving force is – like we talked about all through the spring in the
defensive meetings – hey, we compete against the best in the league in
pre-snap and things that go on in the course of a drive and adjustments.
(Rodgers is) the best I’ve ever been around – the volume and his
ability to see so many things. We need to learn from that.”
Reshaping the Pack
McCarthy’s outlook was influenced heavily by a stint on staff with Marty Schottenheimer’s
Kansas Chiefs, who made no major changes after going 13-3, earning the
No. 1 AFC playoff seed and losing in the divisional playoffs in 1997.
The next year, they went 7-9 and everybody got fired.
In Green
Bay, there seems to be one significant change every year, such as the
revamped practice schedule McCarthy credits with helping the team stay
healthy in 2014. And those changes tend to be proactive, rather than
reactive.
McCarthy, 51, says he’d resolved to give up play-calling
– a time-consuming process he found harder and harder to fit into his
routine last season – as part of a staff shakeup long before a 16-0 lead
slipped away and the offense went three-and-out on two key
fourth-quarter drives in the NFC championship loss to the Seahawks.
“I’ve
taken this offseason as a chance to take a Year 1 mode of questioning
every job responsibility we have, questioning every computer report,
every presentation method, playbook entries,” said McCarthy, who already
has Phase 2 of the transition planned for after this season as he
continues to narrow the focus of his job.
Among
the questions McCarthy wanted to tackle this year: How could coaches
improve the defense’s communication to match the offense’s superior
level?
The answer began with letting the defense tap into the
Packers’ greatest resource. McCarthy began spending the bulk of his time
with Green Bay’s defensive players, whom he not only questioned on
Rodgers’ operation at the line of scrimmage – “Why’s he doing this? Why
do you think he’s doing that?” – but gave some answers, too.
“What’s
really good is when you have a guy that’s as efficient in offensive
football as Mike, for him to be able to share with the defense sometimes
an offensive perspective and how they look at it,” defensive
coordinator Dom Capers
said. “When Mike says that, they’re going to absorb it, listen to it
and hopefully, there’s tips in there that can help us perform better.”
That
some of those tips may have mitigated the advantage Rodgers had in
practice on a defense he knows so well may not be a bad thing either.
“We
all have tendencies, so it’s good to try to break some of those and we
do it with dummy signals and dummy words,” Rodgers said. “We all have
our little idiosyncrasies that we can’t help sometimes, and Mike
obviously went over them and shared a lot of them with the defense.
“It’s
fun. You try not to get bored hitting check-downs or hitting the same
progressions you’ve been through in the last 10 years. But you’re only
human sometimes.”
Green Bay's challenge
It’s impossible to replace a player the caliber of Pro Bowl receiver Jordy Nelson,
who was lost to a major knee injury in last weekend’s exhibition at
Pittsburgh. But that’s part of why the Packers have put so much time
into accelerating the awareness of young players such as receivers Davante Adams, Jeff Janis and rookie Ty Montgomery.
Before
Nelson’s injury, McCarthy said he intends to keep spending as much time
as possible with the defense, as well as special teams. He still
watches the offensive tape every day, but his input there will be
upstairs with coaches – the opposite of past years. He calls himself the
self-scout, charged with “looking at everything we do from as many
different angles as possible.”
By next spring, perhaps McCarthy will have secrets to share with Rodgers about the defense, too.
“It
was really interesting,” McCarthy said, “because when we broke the
meeting, walking out, Clay (Matthews) was like, ‘Gosh dang, all this
time, Aaron’s so frustrating to compete against. I know he’s a great
player, but he knows every call, he knows everything we’re doing.’
“Then he goes – classic Clay – ‘Well, what do you have on me?’ I said, ‘That’ll come later.’”
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