Bleacher Report today said Egos took down the Pack, that Rodgers had a grudge against MM dating back to when he urged the Niners to take Alex Smith, not him with the first pick. Thought MM had a low football IQ.
Holy ****.
Some serious shade being thrown in all directions in this article, by former (and very good IMO) Packers' beat writer Tyler Dunne.
https://syndication.bleacherre...tter_impression=true
EDIT: This is the article mentioned in YA's post right before this one.
And what, he waited until year 12 in his system to get revenge? Rodgers is a pro and your HC/QB don't have to be best friends. The most realistic scenario is that MM and Rodgers knew MM was a lame duck and it was difficult to really get motivated. That's a bad excuse, but there was a new GM, stalwart players like Jordy, Clay, and Cobb were either being jettisoned or told they weren't being resigned, and no serious players were added to make a SB run (especially after injuries to Cobb and Allison). I think the trajectory of the roster and team was either headed toward a serious SB push if they obtained Mack or a soft rebuild if they didn't. If they had gotten Mack I could see things going much different from a personnel standpoint. But we didn't and I think that signaled this team was looking to get younger with a new HC.
So Dunne's sources are Ryan Grant, DuJuan Harris, Jermichael Finley, Greg Jennings, and a few "unnamed sources". Several of those "unnamed source" quotes sound like stuff we've heard from Rodgers estranged brothers. Really hard hitting stuff. 
I just read it. Of course, the same 2 outspoken individuals (Finley and Jennings) are widely quoted throughout. And they don't like Rodgers. We've heard this before. McC could no longer coach Rodgers, plain as that.
The massages in his office crap instead of being in meetings is pretty bad.
But wow......seems like a ton of shit going on at 1265. How much do I believe??? I keep going back to the last two years like MIke’s wife said, he was checked out. So I do believe a lot of it. Wow, just wow.
One wonders why in the Seattle game with five minutes left and the Pack using three straight running plays ineffectively as Seattle burned its time outs that Rodgers didn't change the play at the line to play action and throw a short pass to Nelson who was working against a one-armed Sherman.
I'd like to hear quotes from guys who were there more than 5 minutes and don't have sour grapes. Matt Flynn would have been a good one to talk to, he was supposedly close with Rodgers and has no loyalty to MM. Same for Brett Hundley although I don't know how close he was with Rodgers. James Jones perhaps? Charles Woodson? I want to hear from guys who were hear and had the pulse on the lockerroom, if James Jones or Charles Woodson confirmed this then I would believe it 100%. Greg Jennings and DuJuan Harris? Not so much.
Grave Digger posted:and he had a bad 2 year run.
Yeah, no. He rode coattails.
McCarthy on Murphy’s post-firing comments about complacency setting in, and left tackle David Bakhtiari citing a decline in accountability last season: “When you throw out words like complacency and accountability, that bothered me. That's not accurate. I'll be first to say that coaches are in the business of being criticized. We deal with it on a daily basis. But when you throw out a statement like that, you better have it right. A big part of the success I've had in this league is due to a tireless work ethic. All coaches work hard, but the accountability comment was totally inaccurate. I held my coaches and players accountable every year. Our internal fine process would support that.”
» My take: This offseason, Bakhtiari said an unnamed player was late for a flight to a road game and wasn’t even fined. McCarthy is saying he in fact fined the player, even if the player didn’t cop to it to teammates.
As for complacency, even if McCarthy didn’t see it, I have to think some crept in. One member of the organization I’ve spoken with thinks it started after the Packers lost in the NFC Championship game in the 2014 season. The Pittsburgh Steelers are probably experiencing the same thing with coach Mike Tomlin, who’s entering his 13th season as their coach. There’s a reason Bill Walsh and Al Davis said a coach should stay with a team for only 10 years. Bill Belichick is the outlier, not the norm.https://www.jsonline.com/story...ismissal/3354220002/
I for one am not a big bleacherreport guy but I did like this article and if its true it sure does shed some light on what has been going on.
Two quotes in particular stuck out to me:
"it angered defensive players "every day" how little interest McCarthy showed in them"
"As one player put it, Thompson assumed the Packers system was automatic and he could just plug cheap rookies in"
To me these two quotes are at the root of what really went wrong these last few years. MM never seemed to pay much attention to anything going on with the defense and TT falling asleep at the wheel.
I am not sure what to think of AR at this point but I do think he wants to be coached (and has said so) and on the same page as them. Time will tell how that works out.
Interesting piece from Dunne. Regardless of how you care to assign blame or who you choose to believe it's pretty clear the organization was dysfunctional. Just another indication of Mark Murphy being oblivious to what was happening and apparently asleep at the switch. Interaction between the new coach and AR should be very revealing.
After reading that article, they all ****ing suck. It's pretty obvious egos are part of the business, particularly with a superstar QB but there isn't a thing in that article that hasn't been openly hashed here. That's pretty bad considering fans usually drum up runaway theories. Every bit of it was true. ****.
The Heckler posted:I for one am not a big bleacherreport guy but I did like this article and if its true it sure does shed some light on what has been going on.
Two quotes in particular stuck out to me:
"it angered defensive players "every day" how little interest McCarthy showed in them"
"As one player put it, Thompson assumed the Packers system was automatic and he could just plug cheap rookies in"
To me these two quotes are at the root of what really went wrong these last few years. MM never seemed to pay much attention to anything going on with the defense and TT falling asleep at the wheel.
I am not sure what to think of AR at this point but I do think he wants to be coached (and has said so) and on the same page as them. Time will tell how that works out.
Yeah, those grabbed me too. Also the confirmation of the country club environment. What a wasted era.
To me, Mayo LaFrog and I Am Gute get my full support. If they have to hammer Rodgers, do it. I really don't think it'll come to that. Rodgers may be overly sensitive but if he's got a coach and staff that is excited about building an innovative offense I can't see him not being fully onboard. I don't give a shit about his personal life or how he handles it. If he's engaged when he's on the field and the team is excited that's all I want to see.
Reading about Thompson is painful. Especially if the guy is slurring his speech it's has to be pretty clear he's in a pretty serious state. I can see why the exodus occurred. Here's to I am Gute building a new FO.
Oh, and Angry Bald Man. I bet the defense doesn't feel disrespected with him around.
Ok and now Colin cowturd’s take on this whole situation...... *gag* *gag* *gag*
Country club atmosphere is exactly right. How in god's green earth can a head coach of an NFL team be getting a massage during final prep during game week? that to me is just insanity. And MM is shocked he got fired during the season? I would bet there are literally a thousand other things we will never know that led to his firing.
There hasn't been one national yapper that's been remotely close to the truth in these situations. This board has more legitimacy than those clowns.
In season or after the last game....Mike will be just fine. Much like The Godfather, this is the business he signed up for. Most coaches, successful or not do not go out when or how they choose.
He gave us quite the ride and good luck to him and his family in the future.
Lets move on.
I don't believe that article....some of it sure but it wasn't that bad.
Simply time to move on....let's look forward because you can't change the past.
As a Packer fan, one can only hope that when Aaron Rodgers reads that article, he adds another chip onto his shoulder.....and decides to Scorch the Mother ****ing Earth !!
I totally agree it is time not worry about the past and too move on to the next chapter of the Packers.
Boris posted:I don't believe that article....some of it sure but it wasn't that bad.
Simply time to move on....let's look forward because you can't change the past.
Agree. Mike McCarthy is not in GB anymore, lamenting about what could have been is a waste of time. We got a new start.
The Heckler posted:I for one am not a big bleacherreport guy but I did like this article and if its true it sure does shed some light on what has been going on.
Two quotes in particular stuck out to me:
"it angered defensive players "every day" how little interest McCarthy showed in them"
"As one player put it, Thompson assumed the Packers system was automatic and he could just plug cheap rookies in"
To me these two quotes are at the root of what really went wrong these last few years. MM never seemed to pay much attention to anything going on with the defense and TT falling asleep at the wheel.
I am not sure what to think of AR at this point but I do think he wants to be coached (and has said so) and on the same page as them. Time will tell how that works out.
The dysfunction in Green Bay was real and it is time to reckon with it in order to cleanse the palate and move on.
Hard to kick a guy who had obvious health issues, but Thompson was just not very good during the second half of his run as GM and as GM he was the head of football operations. That said, he drafted Rodgers and put enough talent together to get the team to another SB in 2014, so in the long run I expect him to be held to account just a bit less than Mac.
As for Mac, his brand is now so tarnished that I'd not be shocked if he did not get another head coaching gig. This is a truly bad look for a coach whose reputation is as a QB whisperer. I mean no one is going to hire him for his defensive prowess or ability to hire a defensive mind.
Finally, Rodgers is going to join Thompson and McCarthy as "farts in the football wind" unless he gets back to another Super Bowl under a different GM and head coach. Hope he gets that done in Green Bay.
The overwhelming chorus is that MM's offense was "simple" and predictable and that he never evolved to improve within a changing NFL. His success was due to a stacked roster and HOF QB. If that is even a simplistic way of summing it up, I'm not sure an NFL team looking to the future for a new HC would want a candidate with that trajectory.
If people think Brady and Billy don't have egos like MM and AR they are fooling themselves...but the difference is, they can put them aside just enough to win a lot of phucking games.
Yes, AR has an ego, and probably has behaved like a passive-aggressive little twatwaffle over the years...but the guy can do what very little people in this world can with a football. I've never seen him pull a Bert where he hid from the media. He has never had this "refer to him as Mr. Favre," attitude.
I don't buy he's not a leader...you don't have to be a rah-rah Bert type to be an effective leader.
Yeah, AR shares some blame...but the architect of this masterpiece of failure was McDumDum...#12 was changing plays, and running the offense...but it was the Head Ass-tard in Charge that was allowing Slowcum, Compers and Zook to run that end of the Green and Gold $hit Show.
This article confirms everything I ever felt about The Sons of the Monongahela. Some of it is probably hyperbole, but there's a whole lotta truth in it too I'm betting.
Rodgers is a diva, but every HOF-level QB anywhere is.
A 40 year old Tom Brady clearly went over his coach's head and got Jimmy Garoppolo traded last year. Shoot, Brady has his own personal trainer that travels with the team. It's just that Bill Belichick overcomes all the shit going on by out scheming everyone else and not worrying about whether his offensive coordinator or QB coach gets too much credit. The Van Pelt comments in the article are one of the most underplayed so far - he got fired because he was too close to Rodgers and too smart for McCarthy to not be threatened.
Big Ben managed to contribute to running two superstar skill position players out of town. Actually, I think the Big Ben example is a good one, because both Brown and LeVeon Bell hate him. Why do they hate him? Because Big Ben got the big money compared to them. Why do Jennings and Finley hate Rodgers? Because AR got the big money and then didn't. In the article, Jennings has the audacity to complain about Rodgers telling the 49ers they should sign Jennings AFTER Jennings admitted during a game he was dogging his routes because he was in a contract year? That tells you all you need to know about Jennings. He was a POS teammate who had his sister do his bashing for him. Finley has multiple baby mamas and keeps getting into the news for not supporting them. He has zero credibility on this. The majority of the AR bashing is from those two clowns. AR gets criticized for not complaining more often and more publicly (internalizing it)? That's one where AR can't win.
Underneath all of this is the fact that MM was crappy coach who designed a great offense with the talent he had in 2009-2011 and then refused to adapt when the league evolved. I feel stupid for defending him as a coach. It appears he was a Chauncey Gardiner type (look up the movie "Being There"). Rodgers was going to be a challenge for anyone to coach - but it's a good problem to have. When MM got complacent, he relied on AR to save his ass and didn't really complain until the wins stopped.
The fact that TT was not engaged didn't help.
One final thought - Tyler Dunne was in Green Bay from 2011-16 and never wrote about any of this before?
Wow, a journalist's dream, full of arm-chair psychiatry, introspection into the head of one of the game's most exciting quarterback's, and back-stabbing ex-teammates. While I believe that there was a definite "schism" between MM and Rodgers, as the results speaks for itself, Tyler Dunne has whipped up a story that would give any Greek tragedy serious competition. Really, will Jennings and Finley ever be done trying to get themselves more attention and importance by digging on Rodgers? Seems to be their new-found fame. In a game where players are paid like lottery winners there will always be bruised egos and jealousy. But this story tries to go much deeper than it should. Enough already.
Also, if it was so obvious that Bostick was a clown and should have been cut months before the NFC Championship game, then MM should have been fired that off-season. But if TT wasn't up to being a real GM, that was part of the problem.
Honest to Pete! After reading that it is amazing they won as much as they did!
Yeah....who knew they all hated each other so much
If MM was such a "dim" HC, I still wonder why BB went out of his way to congratulate him after losing to MM in that 2014 game at Lambeau. BB rarely does that in any circumstances and probably even less often if he doesn't respect the opponent.
Grave Digger posted:So Dunne's sources are Ryan Grant, DuJuan Harris, Jermichael Finley, Greg Jennings, and a few "unnamed sources". Several of those "unnamed source" quotes sound like stuff we've heard from Rodgers estranged brothers. Really hard hitting stuff.
I realize that Gregarious J and Jerrymandering Findoodle are always available for a ARodg-ripping quote but there is plenty meat on the bone in that piece. To dismiss it entirely is silly, IMO. Also, there is the 'ol 'where there's smoke there's fire' comment and my word, there has been plenty of smoke…
chickenboy posted:Honest to Pete! After reading that it is amazing they won as much as they did!
It's really not.
Successful organizations in every walk of life deal with exactly this every day. Successful people have egos. More success leads to bigger egos. People get petty. People think they are the most important cog in the wheel. People start viewing peers and management as "competitors" as much as, if not more, than actual, you know, competitors. Successful groups think they can just keep doing what they do - hell it worked before. Innovation gets stifled because it's just easier to say "I'm not changing, this worked before". That leads to complacency. And not complacency as in "I'm sitting on my ass and I'm not doing anything", it's a complacency in an unwillingness to change or truly estimate what other companies are/aren't doing, a complacency in recognizing what are truly strengths and what are truly weaknesses. A complacency in thinking that change is required.
It's the rare company or group or franchise that avoids all of that. All if these issues are why companies like Xerox or Sun Microsystems or Kodak or Blockbuster or Polaroid are dead. All were full of amazingly super talented people that got caught up in what they perceived made them successful, it's what made them say "we do what we do", it's what led them to underestimate what was going on around them. The companies and groups that stick around and thrive and get past this recognize the egos and what made them successful, but can put that aside to develop and grow and change. It's HARD FARKING WORK and it's massively uncomfortable to do that.
Continuity is great in many ways. Continuity over a longer stretch of time presents these types of challenges. And, in sports, just due to the nature of it, you rarely get groups that are in tact long enough for these issues to show up. But, in almost every case, it does. Messages get ignored. Hell, messages don't need to be delivered anymore. "This worked and will work again". "I know more than XXX". It happened in GB, and it's happening in Pittsburgh. NE has done the best job of not succumbing to it, or masking enough of it.
It's why I've been saying for 3+ years that MM was stale and stubborn and doing the same things over and over and it was time for a change. You really have to be disciplined to be able to manage through a length of time and challenge yourself and those around you to stop resting on your laurels or assuming your shit don't stink, or because X worked in 2011, X will of course work in 2018. The Packers of the last 4-5 years felt like Polaroid saying "Pfft, of course people will always be cool with waiting 3 minutes for a photo to show up after shaking it" or Blockbuster sticking their heads in the sand and missing that the Netflix challenge wasn't "DERP WHO WANTS TO WAIT FOR THEIR MOVIE TO BE MAILED AND THEN HAVE TO MAIL IT BACK", but was streaming. It felt like "This is what we did in 2011 (which didn't end in a title, mind you), so we will just keep doing over and over and over because what anyone else is doing doesn't matter".
So, it's not surprising that they had any success, the success is what breeds this. And the talent that leads to that success is still there and provides enough talent to avoid too steep and/or quick of a fall. But, failures aren't around long enough to experience this. Failures can't fall back on "Status Quo" - you can't be Hue Jackson and say "well I did this in 2017, so we're doing it again in 2018".
You need leaders that really are able to understand this and challenge themselves and their teams to constantly reexamine everything and innovate and throw out the "status quo will always work" mindset. Those leaders are NOT a dime a dozen. And neither MM, nor TT, was that kind of leader. Add that in with a QB that has a massive ego and none of this was surprising, it's been clear as day for 4+ years that this group needed an enema and needed new leadership to look at everything with a fresh set of eyes.
Successful groups think they can just keep doing what they do - hell it worked before. Innovation gets stifled because it's just easier to say "I'm not changing, this worked before". That leads to complacency.
We do what we do.
wow. what a thread. that article, even if some of it was sensationalized, or not 100% 'how it happened' - that's a real detailed set of events...young coach better have his p's and q's ready to go, if ar senses he's smarter than you, it's over.
Here's the bullshit thing with me:
This article cites multiple incidents of Rodger's "divaness" including at one point Aaron supposedly changing a 1/3rd of the play calls from what MM called. But MM's ineptness, his refusal to change his offense when WR's like Jennings, Jones, Driver and Jordy either aged out or were long gone, his ego that felt it was HIS scheme, HIS plays that were responsible for the offense clicking, getting massages, all that is what led Rodgers to believing he HAD to make those changes for the offense to work (see the Dallas playoff game and infamous pass to Cook that Rodgers literally drew up in the huddle). So on one hand, people bitch about how Rodgers tuned out MM or how he kept changing plays, but what other choice did Rodgers have?
You can't have it both ways. MM gave all this freedom to AR to change plays. So he did because of the reasons I just stated ^^^. And then these very same people defending MM are like "well Rodgers wasn't doing what MM called!!".
The bottom line? A lot of egos did fukk up this teams window to win multiple championships. But from MM to Ted to Murphy, this organization simply leaned on Rodgers playing at an All-Pro level for years and years and him bailing out this team, including it's piss poor defense and shit ST's units and then finally, terrible drafting.
Rodgers covered all those warts until, well, he couldn't anymore. And now. SHOCKING!! they created an ego driven 180 million dollar QB who they are tied to for years, like it or not.
Also I'm beginning to shift my thinking more and more than if I'd point to 1 person that is most responsible for this, it's Thompson.
chickenboy posted:Grave Digger posted:So Dunne's sources are Ryan Grant, DuJuan Harris, Jermichael Finley, Greg Jennings, and a few "unnamed sources". Several of those "unnamed source" quotes sound like stuff we've heard from Rodgers estranged brothers. Really hard hitting stuff.
I realize that Gregarious J and Jerrymandering Findoodle are always available for a ARodg-ripping quote but there is plenty meat on the bone in that piece. To dismiss it entirely is silly, IMO. Also, there is the 'ol 'where there's smoke there's fire' comment and my word, there has been plenty of smoke…
I'm not disagreeing that AR caused some of the problems, but I'm sure you could find sources to say similar things about any HOF-level QB. They are the ones that make the big, big money and that sets up a dynamic for this type of stuff. The "Legion of Boom" guys would go off on Russell Wilson, Bell and Brown would trash Big Ben, etc.
The guys who would really know would be the former assistants, who if they are talking are talking off the record - Edgar Bennett, Van Pelt, etc.