Let’s talk football for a minute…

To start off, let me say that with having a lot of family in Wisconsin, I was raised to be a huge Green Bay Packers fan. They’ve been in the news a lot the past two years, and it hasn’t been for winning a lot of games, unfortunately. I’m not looking to get into the subject of Favre, and that whole dispute. Point blank, I think the organization made the right call moving on without him, and Aaron Rodgers has proved he can play. Honestly, I think its one of few good personnel decisions that have been made in the past few years.

This season has been particularly hard to watch. Right now we’re a .500 team- which could be worse, I suppose. The problem with it is that expectations seemed to be pretty high at the beginning of the year, with many experts talking about a possible run for the title. Pretty lofty expectations that are flat out laughable after what we’ve seen out of this team so far, most notably an offensive line that can’t be bothered to block- they’ve given up a league high 37 sacks in 8 games. At the pace they’re going, its very likely we could break the single season record for number of sacks given up, which was set by the Houston Texans a few years back. Not exactly the kind of record to strive for.

What I find to be most alarming about the issues on the offensive line start with the fact that those guys didn’t perform particularly well last year, and the issue was not addressed during the off season from a personnel standpoint. There was no point made to go after the acquisition of experienced, proven linemen- as a matter of fact, they actually chose to get younger and less experienced in that area by picking up linemen in the draft. I’m all for building for the future, but rookies rarely address an immediate need- and thats where being somewhat aggressive in free agency and even the trade market come into play. I would think a supposed “professional” General Manager would understand this, but it’s getting to be pretty clear that ‘ole Ted Thompson doesn’t.

Moving forward, the thing I can’t wrap my head around is that it’s the same problem every game- the line is giving up some almost unheard number of sacks. The response from coach Mike McCarthy? Something along the lines of “It was a communication problem. We’ll take a look at the game tape and correct those issues with the players on Wednesday.” That works if its a case of one really bad game out of five or six, but when it’s every single week- and you’re giving the same response every single week… It gets to be pretty apparent that what you’re doing, or the theoretical “correction” that is taking place isn’t correcting anything. If you’re having to have the same conversation repeatedly, then you’re not saying the right things to clear up whatever the problem is. Its pretty obvious that there hasn’t been any kind of adjustment made- just a stubborn approach to keep doing what you know, because it worked for you somewhere else. Its flat out asinine. In this particular context, this team, these players, and the competition that you have, it doesn’t work. Isn’t the defenition of insanity trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?

This actually isn’t the first time that McCarthy has shown he’s too stubborn to change even when he’s obvious that his game plan is going to fail. The best example I can give is that it cost us the NFC Championship game a couple of years ago. I’m referring to the matchup of Al Harris against Plaxico Burress. If you watched that game, you probably remember full well that Harris got chewed up and spit out- wasn’t really surprising since he’s never proved that he has the athleticism to go up against a marquee receiver. If I remember correctly, Burress had about 100 yards in the first half. What adjustment was made at half-time? Absolutely nothing, which is really hard to understand when the other cornerback we have, Charles Woodson, is better than Al Harris and at least deserved a shot at defending Burress. He couldn’t have done any worse. Instead, Harris was still matched up on Burress and he continued to get torched nearly every time he was thrown at.

This weekend’s loss to the previously winless Buccaneers could be what brings the outcry of the fans thus far this season to a head. Those that follow the NFL know that theres a couple of superbowl winning coaches possibly on the market- Bill Cowher, Mike Shannahan, Jon Gruden, and Brian Billick. Really not the year to be a coach with a team falling embarrasingly short of expectations. Theres some really bad teams this year- Oakland, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis. All those teams have fairly new coaches(some are 1st year), so even as bad as those teams are it seems doubtful they’d make a coaching change so soon. I think the only team that is pretty well certain to make a coaching change at this point is Washington. Should make for a pretty interesting off season as far as coaching changes go- I’m hoping we’ll dump McCarthy and go after Mike Shannahan.

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