The Green Bay Packers have won one Super Bowl, been to the NFC Championship game two other times and made the playoffs eight straight years. To Mike Florio, that is a reason to fire Mike McCarthy. Florio posted his power rankings today and in it he claims McCarthy would have been fired by now if the Packers had a true owner. His reasoning is getting close but not getting over the hump the last six years is worse than not making the playoffs at all.
This just goes to show how little Florio knows the game of football and why he should have stuck to lawyering. Guys don’t fire coaches who win football games at the rate McCarthy has since taking over the Packers. Nobody was calling for Bill Belichick’s head when the Patriots were going nine years without winning the Super Bowl, and he had the greatest quarterback of all time for all but one of those years. No, good coaches don’t get fired, at least not until they have a losing season or two, which is highly unlikely to happen in Green Bay anytime soon. Not as long as Aaron Rodgers is under center.
Ted Thompson is much more likely to have been given the boot if the Packers had an owner. It’s Thompson who puts the roster together and he has been unable to get the Packers to that next level. This year Thompson broke from the norm and actually signed some free agents and I think all of them will have an impact. Thompson is seemingly “energized” and ready for the season to get under way, hopefully to watch the fruits of his labor ripen into a Super Bowl win.
You all know that in the past I have called for both McCarthy and Thompson to be fired, usually after another gut-wrenching playoff loss. I didn’t realize how stupid that was until I read somebody else saying it. While I’m still a little on the fence about Thompson, I can see McCarthy coaching here as long as he wants to. What has impressed me the last couple of years is the way he has turned around his relationship with Rodgers, which many were reporting was tenuous at best for a couple years after the Packers won the Super Bowl. Now the two seem much closer with Rodgers even going to bat for his coach in light of comments made by former player Greg Jennings. That says a lot.
If winning the Super Bowl was easy every team would have a championship. The Packers won one and have had their chances under McCarthy and Rodgers, I truly believe they will get another one before they breakup. It took Peyton Manning nine years to get his second one and Rodgers is young enough to have plenty of chances on “the back nine of his career,” as he said recently. The Packers almost certainly will have another playoff run this year, maybe this is the year they shut Florio up once and for all.