THE INTERCEPTION BY BURNETT

[vince]

Vince, first of all, thanks for the reasoned dialog.

Rehashing this game is getting old fast. The only reason I'm still in the conversation is that I find your point of view fascinating. McCarthy obviously shares your point of view so understanding it is key to my estimation of what the future will bring in Green Bay.

The essence of your argument is that McCarthy did nothing wrong. Players play the game, not coaches. If the players had not made mistakes and had done their jobs properly, the Packers would have won the game and would be in the Super Bowl. The job of the Head Coach is to have "confidence in his guys," and McCarthy did that job well last Sunday.

The problem with that argument is that it is unrealistic and, hence, untrue. Yes, the players play the game, but the Head Coach controls what the players may and may not do in certain, key situations. That was the case Sunday.

For the sake of this discussion, let's agree to forget how the game ended and all that transpired on the field after Burnett's interception. Green Bay has the ball on it's own 43 yard line. There is 5:04 left on the clock. GB has the lead 19-7.

Answer this question: What happens next, i.e., what do the players playing the game do next, RUN or PASS?

If this was a sandlot game, you couldn't answer that question because the players themselves decide what they're going to do. However, in the NFL that is not the case. In the NFL the coach decides what the players will do in that situation and Mike McCarthy decided the players would RUN the ball into the teeth of a stacked defense.

The truth is, that at that moment in the game, Mike McCarthy directly affected play in a way that the players could not. Furthermore, McCarthy decided that the Packers would RUN into the teeth of the Seattle defense on the next two plays and then punt on 4th down.

McCarthy owns those decisions and must explain and defend those decisions to his players and to GB fans. So far, to my knowledge, he has not done so.

Here is how Eric Baranczyk and Pete Dougherty of Packernews.com described McCarthy's series of decisions at that point of the game:



Vince, as you say correctly, deciding on a PASS play does not guarantee first down yardage or a different outcome to the game, but it certainly is a debatable decision, subject to criticism.

Moreover, the importance of that decision cannot be dismissed by tired canards like "players play the game" or by red herrings like head coaches are to be held blameless because they must show "confidence in their guys."

I never said that McCarthy did nothing wrong, nor that a coach's only job is to have confidence in his guys. Those are strawman arguments that take my position to its absurd extreme to make them obviously wrong. Of course those positions are unrealistic and untrue but they're not mine or anyone else's that I've seen.

It's easy to argue with the benefit of hindsight that the Packers should have passed in that situation. Any media pundit or fan can say that and it's the "right" response because running didn't work. They BETTER say that or they open themselves up to criticism. How popular do you think those guys would be with their readership if they said they thought McCarthy did the right thing in that situation in spite of their obvious failure? Baranczyk is being criticized for supporting Burnett's decision to protect the ball in that situation because it obviously was the wrong thing to do with the benefit of hindsight. If he then went on to defend McCarthy in the series immediately following, no matter how nuanced his argument might be, he'd really raise the ire of fans who were shocked by the magnitude of the collapse that followed. What a McCarthy nuthugger.

I can't say though, in good conscience, no matter how open to critique and in the face of the outcome it may be, that either one of those two were responsible for what followed because they weren't. Had they acted differently, things would have been different, likely for the better, but they didn't cause results that followed any more than the Seattle kicker caused the onside kick to succeed.

It was the easiest onside kick to recover you can hope to get, and the responsibility for that failure - the most egregious and important failure in the game by many orders of magnitude - lies with Brandon Bostick alone. It sucks for him but that doesn't change it.

Players and coaches make decisions all game long that impact the game to varying degrees. Putting McCarthy's decisions on that series at the top of the list of important transgressions that determined the outcome and attributing the failures that followed to some wave of emotion that overcame the players as a result of them and caused their subsequent failures is completely mis-interpreting the situation in my opinion.

As I said, it's inarguable after the fact to say that McCarthy screwed up. I put that way, way below some of the other failures that significantly impacted the outcome. There were a few of them (Dix, Hayward, Barrington), but one play had by far the biggest impact on the events that changed which team was in control of that game. Even at the point that Seattle scored their first offensive touchdown just before the two-minute warning of the 4th quarter, the Packers had control of the ball, score and clock - until they dropped it a couple moments later.

I'm not sure why for sure (though I have my theories) but many fans have an overwhelming tendency to blame coaching for everything that occurs on the field. When a team loses, it's always the coaches' fault. Bad playcalling, too soft, dumb risk, unsound philosophy, etc., etc.

Coaches play an important role in games, and a bigger role in their level of preparedness throughout the week and all season, but sometimes the guys on the field have an equal or bigger impact on which team actually wins and loses. In this game, my opinion is that their impact was way, way bigger. The o-line was put in a bad position on that series. McCarthy knew that. It was still a very small determinant in the outcome of that game. It only takes on a bigger impact in the minds of fans and media in retrospect, after the other things that actually did determine the outcome happened. Then you can trace the game back and figure out where the coaches screwed up because they're the reason for everything that happened thereafter.

I don't agree with that.