Fluidity Makes McCarthy a Surprise Success

They were few decision made in recent Packer history that dropped as many jaws as Ted Thompson’s coaching hire of an offensive coordinator from a last-ranked offense. I remember vividly stating in the weeks leading up to the hire that I would have been happy with nearly any of the major candidates at the time—Russ Grimm, Tim Lewis, etc.—as long as it was NOT Mike McCarthy. Anybody but Mike McCarthy.

Why? I saw McCarthy not only as a guy who appeared to be an ineffective offensive coordinator, but a guy who struggled in a power tug-of-war with Aaron Brooks and was a part of a horrid 1999 Packer coaching staff that seemed to begin the cycle of unaccountability for Brett Favre. Worst of all, he appeared to be ego-free, low-key, and little more than a yes-man for a general manager who just fired previous coach Mike Sherman.

Now, once hired, I elected to give Mike McCarthy every chance to prove himself and look for the good in what he did, as well offering criticism. One of my biggest concerns was that when he coached Brett Favre in 1999, he set his then-career high in pass attempts, a record he broke in his final year with Mike Sherman. The fact that Favre broke that record again last season (as well as a bottom-quarter rushing offense) didn’t exactly bring a lot of bubbly confidence that McCarthy had progressed as a cultivator of quarterbacks, much less an NFL offense.

But, I noticed quickly, even before the four-game winning streak to finish the 2006 season, that McCarthy was great at what I called “spit-and-wire”, the ability to take what wasn’t working and somehow make adjustments to get it up and operational. This was particularly important that season, as the unheralded first-year coach was given a lot of raw and NFL-E talent to work with along the interior line, while trying to shoehorn a zone blocking scheme that wasn’t working.

By choosing to keep back seven or eight blockers, and going against the zone blocking grain by pulling guards and implementing more traditional schemes, I praised McCarthy for being able to piece together some success with his flexibility. However, I was still concerned that piecemealing and patching was not going to be a successful strategy in the long run.

But, this season, we saw the maturation not only of Mike McCarthy, who grew much more comfortable in his role on the sideline, but in his ability to adjust as the season went on. Unlike many coaches, who “stay the course” and try to get players to fit their scheme or continue a strategy when it is clearly not working, McCarthy showed a tremendous ability to create and re-invent his team, particularly the offense, to find the easiest path to success.

Call him the anti-Coughlin. I call him “fluid”. Like a mountain stream, water will always find the easiest route down the mountain, even if it takes on some unusual twists and turns along the way. It’s easier to go around the boulder, than to spend the time trying to grind your way through it. It is that fluidity that McCarthy has implemented, and that fluidity that has made him a gem for the Packers.

After just one game, despite his repeated statements that he was going to remain committed to the run, McCarthy realized that the stable of horses he was given to work with wasn’t going to be able to consistently be a threat. He revamped the whole offense. He utilized the shotgun with a short passing game that many of us found uncomfortably familiar from previous seasons, but got his talent to execute consistently. As the running game continued to find its footing, he brought in a spread formation that became as exciting as any offense run in Green Bay in decades, and amazingly, as reliable.

However, games against the Cowboys and the Bears foiled the offense as one-dimensional: perhaps the giddiness of the pass-happy playcalling made it look more like the run-and-shoot than an offensive juggernaut. McCarthy took his diamond-in-the-rough in Ryan Grant and began using him in a more consistent manner, implementing a more traditional running game with the hybrid zone blocking scheme that the line finally began grasping.

He’s also shown a fluid and patient ability to work with players who struggle and make adjustments with them. As the offensive guards struggled mid-year, he shuttled Daryn Colledge, Ryan Spitz, Tony Moll, and Junius Coston around trying to find the right combination, without seeming to injure any egos in the process. As Atari Bigby continued to hurt the team by making critical errors early in the season, McCarthy continued to work with him until he ended up turning into the December Defensive Player of the Month, and a monster in the first playoff game.

But perhaps, his biggest feather has been the ability to rein in Brett Favre, not turning him into a cautious game manager, but not allowing him to remain the careless gunslinger he had been allowed to turn into, either. Favre has not only recaptured the command of his game he lost under Mike Sherman, but sent his loudest critics into hiding. Can you imagine had Favre been playing under McCarthy for the last eight years?

Mike McCarthy was looked over as NFL Coach of the Year, losing to a man who he may face in a Super Bowl in a week or so. And, McCarthy, in all honesty, hasn’t earned that honor as yet. A good coach maximizes what he has to work with in the regular season, and McCarthy certainly has done that. But it is a great coach that is able to elevate that level once he gets to the post-season. It is the next game, and hopefully, the one after that will earn McCarthy and his fluid reboots of his team the honor of being called a great coach.

But, kudos to McCarthy, who has blown our view that a coach should come in with a vision of his schemes and how his team will execute his ideas. What McCarthy came in with was a vision of simply how to win football games, and impressed that vision upon those in his charge, from the wily veterans to the undisciplined youngsters. It is the fluidity of being able to change those schemes, invented and re-inventing the team as needed, finding the easiest path to winning a ballgame, no matter how unconventional it seems, that has made Mike McCarthy a success story for Green Bay fans to cherish.

You Reap What You Sow

As we continue to sift through the fallout of the Chicago Bear fiasco, everybody seems to have a theory as to why the Packers laid an egg in front of their biggest division rival, in a game so pivotal that it made games the following week moot because it ended the home field race prematurely.

But, if you step back and look at it, the results could have been quite predictable. This team hasn’t been built for games like this.

“Crikey!” you say, “How can the Green Bay Packers not be prepared for a cold and blustery day in December? How come they were always so strong under the coaching of the other Mikes? Isn’t Favre 149-1 in cold weather games??”

And the response to that has to be: this isn’t the same kind of team. Period. Particularly on offense.

One of my accolades that I have given to second-year coach Mike McCarthy is that he is very talented at what I call “spit-and-wire”. He is willing, over the course of a season, to adapt and duct tape up holes as best he can. We saw it last season and much of the beginning of this season, when the running game was AWOL. The offense was modified to accommodate it. Of course, it usually led to Brett throwing the ball 45+ times per game, but you have to admire a coach who is willing to tinker and find the smoothest path to a victory.

But those modifications have created a team that is very unlike the teams we’ve grown used to over most of Brett Favre’s career, when players like Dorsey Levens and Ahman Green could be counted on to churn out positive yards on blustery winter days. Certainly, we all remember our favorite “mudder”, Edgar Bennett. On those days, Brett might throw 15 passes in all, and the Packers would eventually wear down the opposing defense, making them long for the warm locker room.

Much as the Bears did to the Packers last Sunday.

As much as people praise Ryan Grant for being a Levens-esque back, he certainly hasn’t proven to be the answer to our running game on a consistent basis. While he has rushed for significant yardage and certainly has made a positive impact on the offense, he does need the passing game to compliment him. For the most part, the passing game has done their part this season.

But, on Sunday, despite the glowing statistic of 100 yards on 14 carries, 90 yards were on 2 of those carries. That left 12 carries for 10 yards, and in a bitterly cold game, you can’t sit back and wait for the home run in between many strikeouts.

A quick look at Grant’s carries for the day (in yards) illustrate the problem: 24, 0, 2, 0, 0, 4, 66, 1, 0, 4,-3, 2, -1, 1.

The amusing part of looking at those statistics was remembering how people used to talk about how Barry Sanders, the former running back for the Lions, used to play. “He might get you three plays for negative yardage running around back there, but then he’ll hit a home run that makes it all worth it!”

But, like Sanders, that style of play doesn’t do much for you in the cold, when smash-mouth football rules the lines of scrimmage. Who can forget the cold playoff game at Lambeau Field in 1994, when Barry Sanders was held to -1 yards rushing in the prime of his career?

The Bears were the lesser team, but their team continues to be built to play at home in the cold weather, rushing the ball 45 times for 139 yards. Adrian Peterson and Garrett Wolfe got the ball early and often, and while they averaged only 3 yards per carry, it was good enough to win a game on a short field in conditions like this.

Thinking back to those dome-team Detroit Lions of the 90’s, there’s another structural change that Mike McCarthy has employed that has really changed the makeup of the Packer offense. While we have praised the four and five-receiver sets utilized this season, it looks uncomfortably like the old Run-And-Shoot offenses of the 90s, offenses that often proved unsuccessful when those dome teams played outside in December.

Those teams also utilized the mid- to long-pass plays for the bulk of their yardage, while the Packers of the 90’s utilized an innovative West Coast Offense that emphasized the short passing game, particularly the screen play.

It would be remiss to note that perhaps the biggest execution difference from the 90’s Packers to the 2007 version is the failure to establish the screen pass successfully, and in a game like last Sunday’s, the screen pass was an effective weapon. We saw Kyle Orton execute the play over and over again, while Favre, once thought of as the finest screen passer of all time, had his passes batted down time and time again.

So, as we bemoan the loss of our teams’ cold-weather advantage we once held in the 90’s and early part of this decade, we have to look at the team we’ve built. Instead of a WCO that pounded the ball with hearty gusto in cold weather, keeping defenses honest and on their heels with effective screen passes, we have something that has a bit more in common with the old Run and Shoot…especially when the temperature drops and the wind picks up.

In other words, Mike McCarthy and his coaches have spit-and-wired this team to maximize what talent they have: a sign of a good coach. However, the double-edge of that sword came back to bite them on Sunday, when the spit-and-wire froze up in Chicago.

Perhaps Favre was correct when he felt the road to the Superdome might be easier on the artificial turf of Texas Stadium than at home in January. Only problem is, we have a home playoff game to play first.

I trust that Mike McCarthy is reviewing game film, and will continue to do so during the bye week in order to “spit-and-wire” this offense into a more familiar cold-weather structure. Let’s hope that it is enough.

A Tale of Two Punters

Out of all the darts that critics thrown at the reign of Mike Sherman, it may be his error as a coach that worsened his most decried move as a general manager.

In the forgettable 2004 draft, Mike Sherman likely sealed his fate as a soon-to-be-ex-GM with his first day picks, which included Ahmad Carroll, Joey Thomas, and Donnell Washington. But the pick that drew the most criticism was the third-round pickup of punter BJ Sander.

Picking a kicker on the first day is quite rare, and reserved for only the cream of the crop. In this past 2007 draft, the first kicker wasn’t taken until the fifth round. Punters, of course, are rarer than a blue moon on the first day of the draft. Sherman compounded the mistake by actually trading up to take Sander.

Now, the discussion and debate on the Sander pick has certainly been exhausted, but we’re not going to talk any more about the pick itself, but what happened afterwards. Because, what Sherman the GM did to Sander, putting an enormous amount of pressure to prove himself, was almost as bad as what Sherman the Coach did to him.

Kickers are an odd breed in football. While quarterbacks can throw harder, running backs can run faster, linemen can hit harder, and defenders can punish fiercer, when a kicker hits some frustration, they have only one thing they can do.

They go out and kick exactly the same way. Same motion. Same timing. Same focus. Like a golf swing. For all the differences in physical size a kicker has compared to the rest of his teammates, what sets him most apart is the methodical, repetitive job itself, and the lack of intensity he can bring to it. You can’t push yourself to “kick harder” or “kicker fiercer”.

As BJ Sander took the field that summer, he already had one huge strike against him: the frustration with Mike Sherman was being taken out on him by fans and media alike. That in and of itself has torched the careers of other kickers: Brett Conway is a great example.

But, it was at that point Sherman and his staff made another critical error that sealed Sander’s fate. Sander kicked his entire life as a three-step punter. It was his natural motion, honed for years and years: a style that made him successful in his years at Ohio State.

But, it was decided that that style wouldn’t be good enough in the NFL, and that Sander had to change it to a shorter approach. The reasoning was that, in the NFL, three steps will get your punt blocked.

But the move backfired completely. Taking a pressure-saturated kid, like Sander, already with the weight of his draft position hanging over his head, and forcing him to change how he did his job resulted in some of the ugliest shanks we’ve ever seen from a Packer punter. The control and timing of your punting approach is very much like your golf swing.

Changing your approach in training camp of the NFL, before the kid has had a chance to even adjust to the speed of the next level, is like honing your golf game for years and years. When you finally get your exemption to play in your first major as an amateur, your new coach tells you that you have to hit from the opposite side of the tee. “Take a couple practice shots, and you can master it while you play the tournament!” he says.

And we all know the results with BJ Sander, a kid who didn’t ask for his draft position, didn’t ask to be traded up for, and didn’t ask to have his entire style changed in training camp. He had three strikes against him before he took his first snap.

Now, fast forward to 2007. A new GM, a new coach, and also, a new punter. Jon Ryan earned kudos for a relatively uneventful but respectable rookie year as the punter for new coach Mike McCarthy. But, unnoticed during his 2006 campaign, when he averaged 44.5 yards per punt (good enough for 9th in the NFL), he also still kicked with his college and CFL style: a three-step approach, just like BJ Sander.

But Coach Mike McCarthy and special teams coach Mike Stock, just like Sherman and former special teams coach John Bonamengo, saw the three-step approach as a liability. They also knew that Ryan would be more effective if he could shorten his approach and get the ball off more quickly and consistently.

But, Stock and McCarthy did one thing very different: they discussed the idea with Ryan, but did not ask him to make any adjustments until after his first full season as the punter for the Green Bay Packers. Unlike Sander, who was asked to shorten to only a two-and-a-quarter step approach, Ryan is being asked to shave off a full step. But, he has been given a full offseason to work on it, with the confidence of entering 2007 as a veteran.

The reasons for the change, according to McCarthy, are Ryan’s inconsistent hang-times, which he says affected his 35.7 net yards per punt. Ryan’s net average ranked in the bottom ten of NFL punters.

"We need to be more consistent in the punting," said McCarthy during the last minicamp. "That's something we addressed in our team goals for the upcoming year."

So far, the difference between how Stock and McCarthy have handled the punting situation seems to be paying off.

"It was Coach Stock's idea, but I recognized last year there were times when I could have been more consistent," Ryan said. "If you look at it on film, my steps were getting too long, and I was too out of control. We thought if I could eliminate that first step and just take two steps, everything would be more compact and more consistent.

“I feel more comfortable with this than I did last year at this time with the three steps," Ryan continued. "Hopefully, that's going to show come training camp and during the season that I worked on it and improved a lot."

Indeed, Ryan’s offseason efforts appear to have made a difference in his performance so far at the minicamps. Not only has his power seemed more consistent, he is kicking the directional punts with more command than he had at any time last season.

You can stick a feather in coach Mike McCarthy’s hat. He recognized a need, but had the wisdom to realize that not only would he very possibly mess up a punter’s approach by changing him on the fly as a new punter in the NFL, but, like Sander, possibly mess up his entire career. McCarthy bit the bullet with Ryan last season, allowing him to build up his confidence before proposing a change that would require a lot of time and patience for him to have confidence in himself.

"It's a big change, but I think I put enough hours into it this offseason that the more I reps I got, the more comfortable I got," Ryan said. "I'd say I'm about 90 percent comfortable with it. I think it will increase hang time. I don't think power is my problem. It's just harnessing that power a little bit more and trying to be more consistent."

And so, as BJ Sander sits, unemployed by the NFL, many say he has no one to blame but himself. But many things were way out of his control, and the decision to make changes to his approach as a rookie may have been his ticket out of the NFL before he ever got a chance to make a regular season attempt.

Someday, Sander may be able to look at a young Canadian punter who some will claim has the ability to make adjustments better than BJ did. The comparisons are inevitable, and there are enough people out there who still find the need to keep the crosshairs on Sander in order to justify their dissatisfaction with Sherman.

Or, Jon Ryan can look back upon this offseason, and be thankful that Stock and McCarthy learned from the mistakes of the past. Ryan may indeed become a solid, successful punter in the NFL, and the Packers can proudly state they did not even waste a draft pick on him.

BJ Sander will likely be watching Packer games on television this upcoming season, but his experiences may have paved the way for another man to have the success his draft position suggested he should have had.

"It's more mental than anything, believing that you can still get the same amount of power with shorter strides," Ryan said. "The toughest thing is just getting over that mental hurdle. Once you get over that, you're fine."