Green Bay Packers head coach Mike McCarthy has come under no small amount of fire lately for his team’s performance. Green Bay is currently 4-5 on the season after losing four of their last five games. They’ve lost to both the Indianapolis Colts at home and the Tennessee Titans in blowout fashion on the road.
It’s getting ugly.
But he’s not fazed by any of it and sees himself in quite the favorable light.
“I’m not into shock and awe or torch the landscape,” McCarthy said, via Rob Demovsky of ESPN.com. “I’m a builder. I’m a developer. You build a culture, you invest in the culture. We look to adjust and tweak on a daily basis.
“Let’s state the facts: I’m a highly successful NFL coach,” McCarthy said. “With that, I’ve never looked at the ride to this point as smooth.”
Based purely on his career record, which is 108-60-1, and based on the fact that McCarthy has won a Super Bowl, he isn’t lying about being “highly successful.”
But there are arguments to be made about McCarthy’s competence as it relates to time management and play calling when games enter crunch time. Not to mention, it really looks like the “highly successful” head coach has lost his team this year.
The Packers just aren’t playing that hard right now, especially on defense. His offense is a broken thing that would be among the league’s worst if not for the talent of Aaron Rodgers. Rodgers is holding the entire team up by himself at this point.
He knows it. We all know it. That’s why he called his team out after their loss, saying the team needs to play with more urgency while still saying it all starts with him.
“There has to be that healthy fear as a player that if you don’t do your job they’ll get rid of you,” Rodgers said, via Bob McGinn of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “I think we’ve all got to go back and the urgency’s got to pick up, the focus has got to pick up … we’ve all got to play better, and that starts with me.”
McCarthy has been highly successful in the past. But the past is the past. He needs to figure out a way to be “highly successful” this year or the Packers will finish below the .500 mark for the first time since 2008.