McCarthy is saying all the right things. He definitely looks to be trying to publicly convince people he's not the stale coach who underachieved (relatively speaking) with two Hall of Fame quarterbacks. The question teams will have to answer... has he really changed or is he just trying to say what he thinks NFL teams want to hear?
FMIA Week 15: Mike McCarthy Gets Creative To Prepare For His Next Shot
LEDGEVIEW, Wis. — It would be unfair to say that Mike McCarthy has reinvented himself in the 54 weeks since getting fired by the Green Bay Packers. However, as he prepares for what he hopes will be a second chance to be an NFL coach come January, tinkering is most definitely happening. He works many days in silence on his 20-acre place eight miles from Lambeau Field, with his 2-year-old lab Gus keeping him company in the corner of his office on the second floor of a huge refurbished barn/garage/full-court basketball floor, analyzing NFL trends from 2019 gametape and prepping his detailed plan for the next gig. LESS VOLUME, MORE CREATIVITY is one of the signs at his desk. He’s taken it seriously. When you go 23-23-1 in your last three years with
Aaron Rodgers as your quarterback in all but five games, you know you’d better adapt—or you’ll remain an ex-coach.
In the span of three meetings with the 56-year-old McCarthy in the tundra last week, one slide on his deck spoke volumes about where he’s at with the future. It’s his football tech plan.
There’s a flow chart for his proposed 14-person Football Technology Department, including a six-person video unit and an eight-person analytics team. The Chief of Football Technology tops the department, which will run both video and analytics. The top analytics lieutenants will be a Coordinator of Database Management, Coordinator of Football Analytics and Coordinator of Mathematical Innovation. Below them: Football Technology Engineer and two Football Technology Analysts. And finally, a Football Technology Intern. McCarthy spent a day last summer at Pro Football Focus offices in Cincinnati, discovering how much more data is available than he realized. PFF data will be a key component of his analytics tree, as will GPS tracking of players and Next Gen Stats.
The mathematical innovation hire will be crucial. “This guy here has to see the world differently,” McCarthy said, pointing to that job on the flow chart. “He will be very, very important.”
During his Green Bay tenure, McCarthy once asked an analytics candidate for a Packer job to spend a couple of days observing everything they do on the football side of the business. Come up with a few suggestions how we could do things better, McCarthy asked this young math guy from Harvard. He observed a ball-stripping drill, where defenders tomahawked down on the ball, trying to force fumbles. The guy came back a few days later, with math formulas suggesting that it would be more efficient to punch from below the football in the ballcarrier’s arms. McCarthy was convinced. The Packers changed the drill.
I asked McCarthy if he watched “Jeopardy.” He didn’t. I mentioned the summer run of the brilliant James Holzhauer, who obliterated opponents for 32 straight games and won $2.7 million. Holzhauer’s model: be very aggressive, very fast, and always bet big. I met Holzhauer in July
and wrote about him, and he had different ideas about football strategy and football betting that I hadn’t heard before. McCarthy knew of him, and when I told him Holzhauer told me last summer he wanted a job in analytics for a baseball or football team, the coach perked up.
“I want to talk to him,” McCarthy said.
The Lead: McCarthy
The column will be different today, because of my trip to Wisconsin. I’ll cover the events of the weekend in a few moments. But if you can’t wait, scroll down. I hope you don’t, because you’ll learn a few things about McCarthy and his gap year that I found interesting.
In transit with McCarthy on Wednesday evening in Green Bay, we drove past the west side of Lambeau Field on Ridge Road. What a scene. The stadium used to be pretty much a football stadium with office space for the team; to the west, a drab strip mall. Now the stadium is fully modernized, lit up with event space, statues and the bells and whistles of modern stadia. Across the street is the Titletown development, including a state-of-the-art hotel, a tubing and snowboarding hill, skating rink, brew pub and restaurant, with a park and football field. Just off Ron Wolf Way is a planned residential development with homes and condos.
McCarthy coached the team for 13 seasons, longer than any coach in Packers history since Curly Lambeau’s 29-year run ended in 1949. McCarthy was 50 games over .500, and even though it ended poorly, he makes it clear—riding his truck through the streets of Green Bay—he doesn’t want to move on from the memories of football nirvana. Ever.
“Hits you right here,” he said, patting his chest discussing his feelings driving by the old place. “I love the place. I loved every day there. It’ll always be that way for me, and nothing can change it—not even the way it ended. I’m proud of that place. You know what? I had a little bit to do with the expansion of that place. I used to talk about it to our team. We had a stretch of maybe seven, eight years where there was construction every offseason. I used that as a little chip of motivation. ‘You guys are a part of this. We’re making this place better for future generations. Be appreciative for the opportunity to be a part of such a great place, with such great history.’
So NFL-odd, when you look at the McCarthy life. You work at a place for 13 years, and basically run the show, and then one night, Dec. 2, 2018, you’re fired, and after the next day, you never step foot in the place again. He and his wife, Jessica, who is from Green Bay, decided to stay here with their school-aged blended family of four kids (McCarthy’s adult daughter from a previous marriage, Alex, lives in Los Angeles). “We never considered leaving,” McCarthy said. “This will always be home base for us.” Never in the past year has he heard anything negative out in public, which has been a boost. Never:
Why didn’t you get more than one Super Bowl out of Aaron Rodgers? Did you get stale? So I asked it.
“I think [getting stale] is a convenient criticism,” he said, sitting in his office on a 6-degree Wisconsin afternoon. “I don’t agree with it, but like with anything when you are criticized, you need to shed a light on it and look at it. I think this time with the other coaches has given me that opportunity, and you have to be honest. We got away from motion and shifts and multiple personnel groups that we used in the past, so you look at the why . . . and quite frankly you apply it to the next opportunity.”
So he has worked alone some days, and other days with three other coaches—including former Saints head coach Jim Haslett, who commutes from his home in Cincinnati—who he hopes will be the nucleus of his next coaching staff. Never would McCarthy have said this a year ago, and he’s a little surprised he feels this way now. But he told me in life and in football, he calls this year “a gift.”
“I am so thankful for the time it has given me personally,” McCarthy said. “To be an NFL coach for a long time, just being in the coaching profession, just to have the ability to step away and be a normal father, be a normal husband, that has been incredible. Just the quality moments that we were able to have . . . sitting with my two [elementary-school] daughters by the fireplace for 15 minutes before bed, it’s such a wonderful opportunity. . . . But quite frankly it’s also given me a great opportunity to take a deep dive professionally.”
If I’m an owner or club president the first week of January, my questions will stem from that. McCarthy’s 22 years older than one NFC wunderkind, Sean McVay, and 15 years older than another, Kyle Shanahan. And another bright young mind, 40-year-old Matt LaFleur,
has the Packers 11-3 and steaming toward a strong playoff run in his rookie coaching season. McCarthy will need to show he’s going to be better, and more innovative, than he was at the end in Green Bay.
Drinking his morning health-boost celery juice Thursday, he thought,
It’s time, it’s exciting, and I’m ready.
Regarding the new . . . let’s start with the center snap.
Last year, the Packers played shotgun on 72.2 percent of their offensive snaps, seventh in the league. It fit Aaron Rodgers early, because he hurt his knee in Week 1 and wasn’t as mobile as normal. And Rodgers is excellent in shotgun, so it became a matter of course most of the season. But McCarthy would rather the quarterback play under center 50 to 60 percent of the time. Better for play-action, number one. And better for the epidemic of jet motions sweeping the league, he thinks. A little thing? Maybe. But his coaching group studied every offensive snap of the top 10 offenses last year, and they’ve continued dissecting the best teams this year. And they’ve found how the smart offensive teams—the Rams, the Niners, even the Bills—are using varieties of motion speeds, and different snap-points, and frustrating defenses.
“As a play-caller, you’ve got to stress the defense,” McCarthy said, “and one of the things watching all these teams has shown us is how good some teams are at challenging the eye discipline of the defense. Makes ‘em think at the snap of the ball, which is huge. This bullet-motion sweep, this jet motion, at different tempos, different speeds. I just really like what it does to a defense. We call those things ‘nuisances’ for the defense.”
McCarthy will add more than just a play or two of this, he said. “You can take the same exact formation, and a shift and a jet motion will look exactly the same to the defense. Then you figure all the plays you can run off that formation—run strong, run weak, an RPO [run-pass option for the quarterback], a quarterback-keep, and a full fake with a downfield pass. When Frank [Cignetti, his offensive co-designer] and I are designing the offense, we say let’s have five plays, or maybe a six-pack of plays, that fit a distinct shift and motion with different purposes.”
When McCarthy showed me some plays to illustrate what he’d import into his offense, the one I liked most came from the third play of the Cowboys 2019 season. “RPO Dover” is what McCarthy called this. On second-and-eight from the Dallas 40, the Cowboys lined up in a power-run formation and design—seven across the offensive line,
Ezekiel Elliott motioning from the left flank into a sidecar to
Dak Prescott, with two seeming distractions only,
Amari Cooper and
Michael Gallup, split wide left. The Giants had a cornerback eight yards off Gallup, outside the numbers, and a safety 10 yards off Cooper, who was inside of Gallup. At the snap, Prescott play-actioned to Elliott, flowing to his right. Nine Giants flowed to that side. Prescott pulled the ball out of Elliott’s gut. Both receivers ran quick in-routes, unchallenged by defenders, and Prescott flipped to Cooper, inside, for one of the easiest nine-yard gains of his life. First down.
McCarthy was visibly excited by the play. “The beauty of it,” he said excitedly, “is you can still run. It’s a clean run. But the free yards on the pass . . . that is such a smart design.”
If McCarthy gets a job, expect to see that play, and lots of different motion concepts, in 2020.
He’d also stress the two-minute offense (along with a defense more skilled in defending the two-minute offense) from the first day of mini-camp. “So many advantages to playing fast,” he said.
He is not forceful about the kind of organization he’d like to have, and whether he’d get to import a GM with him or work with an existing one. “It’s about the right fit,” he said. One thing we discussed that’s fascinating to me: the concept of a “futures” coaches, or a research coach on each side of the ball. For the last few years, some colleges have hired coaches between jobs to be “coaching analysts,” coaches who can’t be on the sidelines but can work on projects and future plays and schemes to help the existing staff. Such coaches, McCarthy believes, could do the kinds of projects and research he and his coaches are doing this year. For instance, Alabama’s Nick Saban has had offensive and defensive brains (in 2018, for instance, ex-Tennessee coach Butch Jones for defense, current Carolina running backs coach Jake Peetz on offense) to help the staff stay current.
“If you have an owner who’d allow you to hire a futures coach on both sides of the ball, that could really help,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy will also stress something if/when a team wants to talk: his mechanical work with quarterbacks. He’s got quarterback footwork video of Joe Montana’s drop from his time as an offensive assistant in Kansas City in 1994 . . . all the way up to Rodgers video in Green Bay. In 2006, that Rodgers video shows him rounding out his pass-drop, holding the ball high and looking imprecise. A more recent camp video shows a lean and fit Rodgers confidently and precisely dropping back with good ball placement and perfect steps. “It’s a quarterback business,” McCarthy said, “and the first thing my next quarterback’s going to see are the quarterback tapes.”
McCarthy doesn’t fit the recent mold of young and new and off the Shanahan/McVay tree. But he’s had a year of continuing education to remake the guy fired after a bad end in Green Bay. Will that be enough? One club executive who will probably be in the market for a new coach asked me a lot of questions about McCarthy last Friday. No idea if he’ll ask to interview him. But we’ll know soon enough. The coach-interview season is two weeks away.
Eight miles from Lambeau Field, Mike McCarthy is trying to prepare himself for his next job in coaching. Peter King opens Football Morning in America Week 15 with a visit to McCarthy in Green Bay to see the new tricks an old dog is learning. Also in the column: • The Bills get a big...
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