It’s a blog, so I can be self-referential, right? Good.
Last year, after the Packers lost to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, I wrote a
post entitled “Adjusting Expectations.” Basically, I took a wide angle look at the Packers and concluded that they weren’t going to meet the high expectations many of us had for them before the season. I was scolded by other Packer bloggers for doing this. Our friend Aaron at Cheesehead.tv said I should know better. Even Brother Andy chastised me for “jumping ship.”
But I wasn’t jumping ship, I was just making some fairly obvious — if painful — observations.
And here we are again. The Packers lost to a Tampa team that earlier this year put up 86 yards on offense. They hadn’t won a game. They were ranked 28th on defense. They had 11 sacks. They were ranked 28th on offense. They were 28th in points scored — a total of 96 points.
Today, the Bucs had 38 points. They had 6 sacks. Their offense moved the ball easily. Their defense was stingy.
And the Packers flat-out sucked.
For the most part, I’ve been a defender of Mike McCarthy and Ted Thompson. No longer. McCarthy’s playcalling sucks. Yes, the players have to execute. That’s the smart-guy way of defending bad playcalling. It’s not convincing.
Our offensive line is atrocious. It was atrocious last year. It’s on Ted Thompson that it still sucks.
The irony is that the conventional wisdom held that Thompson and McCarthy jeopardized their futures in Green Bay because they refused to put up with Brett Favre’s antics. And it turns out that their decision there looks good. Yes, Favre has played well. But Rodgers is a future star. Amazing to me that they wouldn’t come up with an offensive line to protect him.
But the Packers right now are a bad team that sometimes plays good defense. But they are a bad team.
It is the job of the head coach to prepare teams to play. McCarthy has failed in that task repeatedly. And he failed this week.
Jermichael Finley didn’t play against Tampa. But earlier this week he wrote this on “twitter.”
“Where my pack fans that are traveling with us to Tampa. We need this game not a big one but we need it.”
Not a big one?
Ask Mike McCarthy in January if this was a big game. It may be one of the major reasons he find himself among the ranks of the unemployed. Ted Thompson, too.