Mike McCarthy, Green Bay Packers
Perhaps no head coach in all of sports — let alone football — embodies the flaws in judging a head coach by wins quite like Mike McCarthy. The Packers have been successful under his tenure, making the playoffs in all but two seasons and winning Super Bowl XLV. But their level of success doesn’t measure up to their talent, especially in recent years. Much of that is directly due to Mike McCarthy.
McCarthy’s offensive system is fatally flawed because it isn’t designed to help the quarterback, it’s designed to force the quarterback to make plays. With Aaron Rodgers and Brett Favre being the only two starting quarterbacks McCarthy’s ever coached, he’s gotten away with it. However this has not happened without doing serious damage to Green Bay’s title hopes on a yearly basis.
McCarthy, for the most part, refuses to scheme receivers open or use route combinations that play off each other. Instead, he tends to isolate receivers and force them to get open in 1-on-1 situations, putting Rodgers in a position where he has to extend plays and do things out of the pocket. Again, Rodgers is very good at this, and Jordy Nelson, Randall Cobb and Martellus Bennett are all more capable of getting open in 1-on-1 situations than most.
But Green Bay’s offense still stalls with too much regularity.
Over the first nine weeks of last season, the Packers were 15th in passing offense efficiency, per Football Outsiders’ premium database. In 2015, the Packers were 27th in passing offense efficiency over the last eight weeks of the season. Both years, Rodgers was able to bail everyone out and get the Packers to the playoffs. But that’s not something he does because of McCarthy, it’s something he does in spite of McCarthy.