Illegal Procedure

By now, you’ve probably seen that the Green Bay Packers are expected to hire Mike McCarthy as their next head coach. At first, one wonders why a team would interview defensive stalwarts like Jim Bates (whose defense ranked 7th) and Ron Rivera (whose defense ranked 2nd) before giving the position to a man who was responsible for the play of a unit ranked last in total offense and last in third down conversion rate. (McCarthy can also claim “credit” for the performance of rookie standout Alex Smith.)

If one looks at McCarthy’s resume, though, it appears that his brief stint as the Packers’ quarterbacks coach may have contributed to his standing in the Green Bay front office. Brett Favre and his agent publicly lobbied for Steve Mariucci, via a veiled threat that Favre would be more likely to postpone hanging it up if the Mooch was at the helm. The Packers didn’t interview Mooch, though. (To be fair, since the Fords are paying him to do nothing right now, he’d be tough to hire at this point.) The McCarthy hiring, then, raises two interesting possibilities:

1. Ted Thompson wants to extend an olive branch to Favre (by hiring his former position coach) and also have a quarterback specialist at head coach to supervise what is sure to be a challenging grooming process for Aaron Rodgers.
2. Thompson doesn’t give a rat’s ass whether or not Favre returns but wants plausible deniability for the fans: “Well, I brought in his old coach. I don’t know why he decided to retire!”

Draw your own conclusions, but I’d give these two possibilities roughly even odds.

This entry was posted by stuntdog on Thursday, January 12th, 2006 at 8:18 am and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.