The Time Has Come: Al Harris to Safety

As the Packer offseason chugs vaguely again towards the draft, few moves have been made in free agency by General Manager Ted Thompson…to no one’s surprise. This has been his M.O. since he arrived in Green Bay, and his consistent belief in both his ability to find gems in the draft and to develop the talent presently on the roster has garnered him praise, particularly in the wake of a Cinderella season that brought the team to the brink of the Super Bowl.

However, with the unexpected salary cap bonus offered through Brett Favre’s retirement, the pressure will go up a notch for Thompson this year to insure the development of the team without the presence (and salary cap figure) that often served as a lightning rod for Thompson’s fans. With a team seemingly on the brink of greatness, the pressure goes up a bit. Drafting 30^th, Thompson will find less and less options for quality trade-downs, and the fizzle of Justin Harrell and Brandon Jackson last season means that this offseason needs to count.

The timing is important: the team established itself as an unexpected power in the NFC, and needs to keep that momentum going. With the most salary cap flexibility in Thompson’s tenure, it’s time to fill holes and solidify this team to continue to play up to expectations.

So, I offer my free, unsolicited piece of professional advice to Thompson, a guy who has focused on defense since he arrived: finish the defense and get a top flight free safety.

Knowing that Thompson likes to keep out of the high-stakes cesspool that is free agency, this is easier said than done, but the importance should be lost. Thompson has seemingly valued hard-hitting safeties since he’s been here, bringing in Mark Roman, Nick Collins, Marquand Manuel, and Atari Bigby to be the enforcers. Yet, for all of their great hits, they have struggled in coverage and help over the top. Aaron Rouse, a linebacker pretending to play safety, is in the same mold.

Our passing defense has indeed improved from the embarrassment it was in the Manuel years to a middle-of-the-pack squad in 2007. But, despite the accolades that our cornerbacks team of Charles Woodson and Al Harris were among the best in the league, both are over 30 years old and will likely never get any better.

In particular, Al Harris, despite making the Pro Bowl, looked slow and frustrated as Plaxico Burress abused him in the NFL Championship game. At 33 years old, it isn’t unlikely that he is about to follow the same career slide that Antonio Freeman did in the late 2000’s.

Like Freeman, Harris isn’t blessed with blazing speed, but has always compensated with smarts and effort. But every player hits that fateful season when they lose a step, and in Freeman’s case, that step was simply too much for him to make up with effort. Freeman’s career in Green Bay ended with a whimper because he simply couldn’t get from point A to point B fast enough to use his smarts and skills.

Harris has compensated for his lack of speed by excelling at bump coverage, but an athletic receiver like Burress showed us a glimpse of what is possibly the near future, and when a cornerback can’t keep up with a receiver, his career is effectively over.

So, we find ourselves in the market for a cornerback. Since that appears to be on the forefront of our wish lists (and, amazingly, last on the draft lists the past few years), let’s imagine 2008 and how Harris, who is still under contract and would cost $1.2 million to cut, can still fit in: as our new free safety.

This is nothing against Nick Collins, who has struggled to replicate his rookie season success, or Atari Bigby, who generated excitement with his big hits and excellent playoff game against Seattle. But, the point still stands that both players struggle both in coverage and haven’t been able to run the defense like a quarterback.

Like a quarterback, you ask? Perhaps one of the finest strong safeties in recent memory, LeRoy Butler, hit his strongest stretch of his career in the 1996 and 1997 seasons, making All-Pro three years in a row in those seasons and in 1998. While many factors aligned in those seasons for the Green Bay Packers, Butler’s 13.5 sacks in those three seasons marked a tremendous difference from any other season he had, when he only had one season with more than one sack. The difference?

Eugene Robinson. The free agent free safety brought a level of control to the defense that seemingly transformed the entire squad. Not only did it allow the Packer defense to be ranked #1 overall in those two seasons, but allowed LeRoy Butler freedom, to play closer to the line. This was possible because Robinson was able to direct the defense from the backfield, had enough speed and range to help out in coverage, but most of all, was smart.

Oh, and by the way, he was 33 when he played with the Packers in 1996, the same age as Al Harris.

The question is three-fold. First: Would Mike McCarthy be willing to move Harris to safety? Both Collins and Bigby are somewhat established, even though they both tend to play the same kind of position: the hard-hitting run stopper. Harris and Woodson are revered as a tandem of bump and run corners.

Second: Would Harris, a proud cornerback, be able or willing to make a switch to safety? Harris, while never resorting to Mike McKenzie-esque shenanigans, has withheld his offseason services in the past when he wasn’t happy with his contract. Would he see being asked to move to free safety as an insult or a way to extend his career?

Third: Is Ted Thompson, then, going to make the investment for a prime cornerback, which are traditionally more expensive than safeties? DeAngelo Hall just signed a Raider contract that will pay him Favre-esque numbers. Is getting a guy who can play opposite of Woodson without a drop-off from Harris going to be possible? Is such a guy out there an available, and if so, would he fit into Thompson’s philosophy of finances? The draft position makes finding the next DeAngelo Hall difficult, and the best corners are already off the free agent market.

Three hard questions that, in all likelihood, will have Al Harris lining up at cornerback next season. Simply put, I don't see Ted Thompson shelling out for a top-flight cornerback, and I don't know if Harris would accept a change at this point.

But it still stands that this defense has operated for years without the smooth free safety it has needed, a position that relies on smarts, discipline, and coverage instead of hard hits and speed. It's more important for a free safety to know where to rotate his coverage and take the right angle than it is for him to hit hard or have blazing speed. Al Harris deserves a chance to continue to be a great contributor for the Packers for many seasons to come, and this change would give him the chance to not only to that, but make this pass defense into a Super Bowl defense.

Why We Loved (and Hated) Brett Favre

As the dust has settled on the retirement of Brett Favre and his glorious Packer career, there are still the dying battle-cries going between those who have been perceived as the “Favre Lovers” and the “Favre Haters”. Why has this odd battle between all self-proclaimed Packer fans continued for so long? Why has the legend of Brett Favre split the fan base in such a polarized way?

In an amusing anecdote, an old childhood friend of mine was quoted by Peter King in January talking about what Favre has meant to the Packer fandom, going as far as to admit he dreamed of going mall shopping with Brett. Other than that little slip of T.M.I., my buddy talked about how inspirational Favre has been, how the dreams of this little town have ridden on his shoulders for so long, how he would be unable to go to work the day after Favre would announce his retirement.

And, so it was true on that day. But, as the Peter Kings and John Maddens of the world glorified Favre’s name, while the Dr. Z’s and Sal Palantonio’s piled on with words intended to diminish his accomplishments, the question that I ask is “why”?

Why did Favre turn some Packer fans into zealot-crazed Brett fans, who toiled to find any excuse for his mistakes or decline in play? And why did Favre turn other Packer fans into cult-like missionaries crying against anything he said or did, actually calling for Aaron Brooks to be brought back as a better option than Brett?

The answer, in my opinion, doesn’t actually come from his play on the field. Oh, you will certainly find many who will categorize every single interception and every time he didn’t pull out a game in the final minutes, but that’s not where it started. Some will point to his flippant press conferences, saying he undermined his teammates and coaches with politically incorrect, honest opinions.

It all comes down to one thing: Brett Favre let us in.

He let us in, and we saw him as more than a name and a number. We knew Brett Favre more than we’ve known any quarterback, any player in recent memory. For most of us, it increased our own emotional investment in him, our own reasons to root “for” a player as well as a team. He became larger than life, when in actuality, he was one of the only “real life” players we watched.

Most of our quarterbacks nowadays are supposed to be stoic field generals. We tend to frown upon the emotional and wild personalities, such as Ryan Leaf and Tony Romo. What do you know of the life of Peyton Manning, beyond his television commercials and the fact he wears #18 for the Colts? Is he married? Does he have children? Has he ever said anything to really tick you off? What has he gone through in his life that drives him?

But we don’t know those things. Tom Brady has personified that now-you-see-me-on-the-field, now-you-don’t-off almost perfectly until this past season, when his relationship and parental issues crept into the news. We don’t expect that from our offensive leaders. We expect strong, stoic leaders who do and say the right things.

Oh, sometimes, you get a guy like Terrell Owens or Chad Johnson, guys who try to “let us in” with their antics on the field, but NFL fans know an act when they see it. Anyone notice how quiet Chad Johnson got when he stopped producing and his team stopped winning in 2007? Look-at-me antics aren’t letting us see the real person inside, just the caricature they want us to see.

But starting with Brett’s somber press conference, with his coach, his GM, his owner, and his fiancée at his side, announcing that he was addicted to painkillers and was seeking treatment, Favre let us in to see the human side of his life, the painful side, the things we don’t allow anyone else to see. Even coming forward as he did regarding his painkiller addiction was far different from the “no comments” and other assorted denials we hear when today’s players get caught. Denial is the politically correct way to deal with such accusations. Admitting you have a problem is the difficult and correct way to deal with it.

As time went on, the snowball of humanity grew. We saw him play with injuries that most players would have sat down with. We saw him continue to play with a youthful exuberance on the field that we wish other uninspired players would learn from. We saw him go through a very public death of his father, a very public death of his brother-in-law, his wife’s very public battle with breast cancer, and his family’s loss in Hurricane Katrina.

That snowball grew for everyone: not just his fans and growing fanatics, but the paparazzi-like media, who started treating every story about Favre as if it were about Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. Why? Because they knew there was an audience for all things Favre, and they write about what is going to sell copies.

On the other side, though, are the Packer fans who grew contemptuous of this snowball. They, too, spent some time with their Favre jerseys on, cheering him on. But around the early 2000’s, the backlash started. As that media snowball made the Packers into “Favre’s Team”, soon Favre started getting the blame whenever the “Green Bay Favres” didn’t win a Super Bowl. And in some ways, they had reason to do so.

Many football fans don’t want to get involved with their players. They don’t want to know where they came from, where they live, who they’re dating, or what they eat for dinner. All they care about are the cold, hard statistics, the biggest being wins and losses. As we saw Al Harris get eaten up by Plaxico Burress in the NFC Championship game in January, many of us started immediately brainstorming replacing Harris at corner, whether by the draft or by free agency.

Easily substitutable. Pay no mind Harris was a hero in the 2003 playoff game against the Seahawks and had played at a Pro Bowl level for some time. When an NFL player falters, he is expendable. Period.

It’s like we view our players as Madden players. When your starting quarterback falls below an overall rating of 90, don’t you start looking for another digital field general? Do you care about that other quarterback? No…he’s a name and a number, both of which are easily replacable.

Until we start talking about Brett Favre, who for many fans was completely irreplaceable, not just because of his play on the field, but because he allowed us to feel something beyond the name and number. For most of us, this created perhaps the fiercest loyalty to a player in decades, and for most, in memory.

For others, it was a ball and chain. It was an inconvenient loyalty that drove them crazy when the statistics said there is no reason any quarterback with 29 interceptions in a season should ever see a start again in their career, and yet, there he was again.

The insanity worked both ways, both for the Favre Fanatics who would have rather seen the whole team sacrificed, the future mortgaged, to give Brett a chance to prove himself as worthy of his hype, his reputation, his loyalty. And, there were those who took any comment, any bad decision, any “holding the team hostage” to discredit that hype, that reputation, that loyalty.

There would never have been a battle if it weren’t for one thing. Brett Favre broke the rules. He broke the mold of the great quarterbacks, the stoic, impenetrable façade that all are supposed to have, like Starr, Unitas, and Montana. He became more than a name we chanted, a number we wore on our own backs.

We cared. We cared about this man and his triumphs and his failures. We cared because he let us in and see parts of his life we would have kept secret. We saw him take his weakness and turn it into strength, and we cheered him for it, for making us a part of it.

And in some cases, we turned bitter at him, felt used and let down when he didn’t live up to the feelings we were supposed to have, when the facts and statistics didn’t support what we, deep down, wanted to feel.

As Favre rides off on his tractor into the sunset, hopefully the zaniness on both sides of the coin will take a deep breath and appreciate Brett Favre for the things he really was: a gunslinger, a winner, a risk-taker, an improviser, an ironman….and a real person, just like us.

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.