Coaching careers collide as Mike McCarthy faces his Green Bay successor in pressure-packed game

Matt LaFleur wants what Mike McCarthy has: a Super Bowl ring. But McCarthy faces far more pressure to deliver that title this year playing opposite his old team.

Mike McCarthy knows what Matt LaFleur is going through.

Forget, for the moment, about the Green Bay Packers connection. McCarthy once coached a bright young team with an upstart quarterback who performed wildly above expectation in his first season as the starter. That team’s defense was so bad that it cost them a chance to meaningfully compete, including the season that preceded it when McCarthy resurrected the career of his aging, soon-to-be-replaced future Hall of Fame quarterback.

For all the eery parallels between Aaron Rodgers and Jordan Love, McCarthy and LaFleur have more than their fair share as well. But LaFleur can meet his predecessor on this point as well: He experienced the overwhelming pressure of expectation, of facing a lower seed you should by all rights beat, and still feeling burdened by it.

The two coaches meet at a crossroads, we’ll call it the corner of McCarthy Way and We’ll See on LaFleur Blvd. This might be the last, best chance for McCarthy to win an elusive second Super Bowl and prove to history and the football-watching public he is more than a footnote in the story of his former pupil.

LaFleur faces a certain weighty expectation of his own. He too must confront the Rodgers-sized stormcloud over his reputation, but his battle with that weather system has just begun. McCarthy may have left Green Bay ingloriously amid reports he was more interested in his between-meeting massages than game plans, but he did win a Super Bowl. His quarterback school was the stuff of legends in the mid-2000s, and he helped remake Rodgers into the most devastatingly efficient signal-caller the league had ever seen, overhauling his mechanics and empowering him to take on every possible responsibility on the field.

There’s a street named after him for crying out loud.

McCarthy has something LaFleur desperately wants and couldn’t get with Rodgers. But after enduring the vicissitudes of a unique and historic season, with the youngest team in the league, LaFleur enters the postseason with something McCarthy almost never had: house money.

Even early in McCarthy’s tenure, the Packers made defensive-coordinator changes, signed marquee free agents like Charles Woodson, and traded up in the draft to get playmakers like Clay Matthews. The Rodgers-led version of the team reached the playoffs by 2009, and it washed the Brett Favre stench off by ‘10 with a championship. From then on, the only thing that mattered was another Lombardi Trophy, one they never managed to achieve.

The closest thing McCarthy had to a found money season was 2008. But the difference was that season came after a 13-3 campaign that ended in an NFC Championship Game loss and one of the most acrimonious and public divorces in sports history at the time. Rodgers faced antipathy from fans that his eventual successor, Jordan Love, didn’t in part because most of the Cheeseheads old enough to shout anything obscene were old enough to remember the dorks who did that back in ‘08 and know how stupid that looks in retrospect.

Rodgers was expected to be great and that 2008 campaign wasn’t about finding anything out. It was about proving he was the right pick on a playoff team while they were in their competition window with a future Hall of Fame, multi-time MVP quarterback. Sorry, what team are we talking about again? What year?

That’s why McCarthy felt obligated to make a change at defensive coordinator after that 6-10 season in which the defense blew a metric ton of fourth-quarter leads and cost them a chance at the playoffs. There were real expectations on that team, on Rodgers to win.

This season for Green Bay began with a win total of 7.5, projected to finish last in the NFC North. They were too young and too incohesive. Love, dontchaknow, was not him. At least until he caught fire in the second half of the season, playing as well as any quarterback in the league, and led the Brat Pack to the playoffs despite the defense underperforming throughout.

The Packers can set about fixing the defense in the offseason just like McCarthy did once upon a Lambeau time, but now they have to chance to get a headstart on pressure-testing this Green Bay team that, by some measures, is the youngest playoff team ever, especially on offense in the passing game. This week, the tensile test awaiting at AT&T Stadium on Sunday afternoon is as much about planning for the future in Green Bay as it is making a run this season.

Hardening this team sets them up even better next offseason when they have more financial flexibility and a Great Wolf Lodge-sized stash of draft capital. The Pack is a 7.5-point underdog. No one expects them to win. Cover, maybe, but win?

But that’s just the thing. In 2011, the Packers were supposed to dog walk the New York Giants, a 15-1 heavy favorite at home. Gakked it. Without committing football-fan seppuku and reliving every McCarthy-era playoff shortcoming, suffice it to say coach Mac carries with him baggage that threatens to weigh down his historical legacy in a perilous way if this type of losing persists.

And persist it has, at least so far. In 2021, time ran out on the Dallas Cowboys in a 23-17 loss to the San Francisco 49ers at home, the same Niners team that beat the Packers one week later in the most disheartening and legacy-defining loss of LaFleur’s young career and perhaps in Rodgers’ nearly completed run. McCarthy’s Cowboys lost again to the 49ers in the 2022 playoffs, a brutal 19-12 field goal fest.

If LaFleur and McCarthy got a beer after the game, at the very least they could commiserate over getting sonned by Kyle Shanahan, yet another thing they have in common.

McCarthy’s future in Dallas may not be entirely on the line against the Packers, but his spiritual future is. This is an existential threat to his place in football history. If he loses again as the prohibitive favorite at home, that’s a black mark big enough to raise questions about his job. Losing at home, to the youngest team in playoff history, would have Cowboys fans ready to storm the Star. But falling to the Packers? Coached by the guy who replaced him in Green Bay and by all accounts resurrected immaculate vibes that had gone dormant under the noxious taint of complacency?

That’s career-defining stuff. The Packers would have kicked him to the curb, a Super Bowl-winning coach, in the middle of the season, upgraded, and then, just to add insult to injury, gone into his house and kicked him in his ass one last time. Big Mike, ever nobody’s underdog, suffers the prospect of being relegated to football irrelevance, accused of riding the coattails of two quarterbacks and never fully realizing their potential. If the Cowboys lose, the idea of “Mike McCarthy, two-time Super Bowl champion and all-time great coach” is out the window.

And if they win? What then for LaFleur? Meh, a playoff berth for the Packers with Love under center and this preposterously exciting young team was already a win for the Packers. It bought LaFleur runway to get back rolling like the Packers did with three straight 13-win seasons at the start of his tenure in Green Bay.

When you get off the freeway, you don’t have to take McCarthy Way to get to Lombardi Ave. on your way to Lambeau Field. But if LaFleur wanted to take Holmgren Way, he’d have to cross it. Beat McCarthy on Sunday with nothing to lose, and LaFleur can start scoping out a street of his own.