Tag Archives: mike mccarthy

Can the Packers Go 16-0?

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

MINNEAPOLIS – Sunday afternoon at the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis, Aaron Rodgers delivered.

Of course, Rodgers has become so good at delivering lately that it’s hard to imagine there was a time not long ago when Packer fans demanded that Rodgers be relegated to No. 2 and the retired-unretired Brett Favre be given his job back.

Sunday in the Twin Cities, Rodgers brought his team back from a 17-13 halftime deficit against the Minnesota Vikings and in the din at the Dome, recorded a 33-27 victory. He also brought his team back in spectacular fashion. First he threw a 79-yard touchdown pass to Greg Jennings on the second play of the third quarter and then he took Green Bay right back down the field again and before the second half was four minutes old, Rodgers’ Packers had 14 unanswered points.

aaron rodgers1 Can the Packers Go 16 0?

Aaron Rodgers Takes Apart the Vikings Secondary

Suddenly, a 17-13 deficit was a 27-17 lead and the Vikings never threatened again.

Sunday, the 6-foot-2, 220-pound Rodgers (who actually looks much smaller in his street clothes) finished 24-for-30 for 335 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions. He eviscerated a weak Vikings secondary but it was still a remarkable performance considering the thunderous noise inside the Metrodome. Fans from both sides had gathered to see the Packers go to 7-0 and to watch the Vikings new star, rookie quarterback Christian Ponder, get his first start.

Neither story line disappointed. Ponder went 13-for-32 for 219 yards, two touchdowns and two interceptions and got post-game kudos from Rodgers and Green Bay defensive lineman Clay Matthews. He wasn’t an A-plus quarterback by any stretch, but for a first-timer, he was quite good and if nothing else, he gave Vikings fans a little hope.

Rodgers meanwhile, won his 13th consecutive game – count ‘em, the final two games of last year’s regular season, three playoff games then the Super Bowl, and now seven straight this season. It’s the longest winning streak in the history of this storied franchise and it will be remembered as an incredible run even if it stops in Week 9 (the week after this week’s Packers bye week, got it?).

The Packers have beaten New Orleans (42-34), Carolina (30-23), Chicago (27-17), Denver (49-23), Atlanta (25-14), St. Louis (24-3) and now Minnesota (33-27) so far this season. They beat Carolina, Chicago, Atlanta and Minnesota on the road.

If you take a close look at their schedule, there is now a legitimate chance the Packers could run the table: After this week’s bye, they go to San Diego (tough one), play the Vikings at home, get Tampa at home, go to Detroit (San Francisco and Atlanta have put an end to the “Myth of the Lions”), go to the Giants, play Oakland at Lambeau, go to Kansas City, get the Bears at home and then finish with Detroit at home. If this team continues to play as well as it has in its first six games, there is no reason to believe that 16-0 is an impossibility.

As ESPN wrote: “Whether Green Bay can achieve perfection is one question, but the fact that the question is being raised in late October proves how formidable the Packers are.”

“I’m not going there, I don’t want to talk about,” said tight end Jermichael Finlay on Sunday night. “We’ll see what happens at the end of the season.”

Rodgers had a better sense of humour about what probably is, premature talk.

“I’m really looking forward to the bye this week,” he said with a grin. “Going undefeated? Not thinking about that. Although I do believe we can get better. We have seven wins and that’s nice, but there is no doubt in my mind that we can play better football.”

You would not have known that yesterday — especially if you watched the Packers offence. Green Bay had 25 first downs on 421 net yards. Rodgers’ quarterback rating was 146.5.

“It’s never easy coming to the Metrodome and never easy playing the Vikings,” said Green Bay head coach Mike McCarthy. “But at the end of the day, our offence really stepped up. It was our offence that got us the victory.”

And the guy at the helm of that offence is a guy who didn’t get a Division 1 scholarship coming out of high school, played a year of junior college before he caught the eye of head coach Jeff Tedford at the University of California. Played two years at Cal and was told he’d be a top NFL draft pick, but ended going 24th to Green Bay in 2005. He was the butt of derision and anger in Green Bay when McCarthy decided that Favre was gone and Rodgers was now the quarterback.

And yet as he answered questions after Sunday’s game, he was a 27-year-old veteran with a Super Bowl championship, a 13-game winning streak and 7-0 record heading into his bye week.

And one more thing: After Sunday’s impressive win here in Minneapolis, there is now a legitimate reason to believe that if McCarthy and the Packers really wanted to try – and that means playing his starters regularly through all 16 games this season – they could go 16-0 this season.

Aaron Rodgers must stay healthy, of course. That goes without saying. But if he does, and if McCarthy gets on board with the idea, there is a chance this Packers team could defend its Super Bowl title by running the table.

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The Insanity Continues. And the Local Media Proves How Hypocritical It Is Once Again.

Posted on November 14, 2009 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

MINNEAPOLIS — If the Minnesota Vikings win the Super Bowl, it won’t be because they were threatened in their own division.

I mean, how good do the Vikings look after both the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers were clobbered last Sunday and then the Bears lost again on Thursday night?

Well, we’re here in the Twin Cities to watch the Vikings pummel the Lions at Mall of America Field on Sunday and then we’ll be back to watch the Vikings beat the Seahawks next weekend and the Bears on the 29th. Three straight home games against inferior talent should have the Vikes at 10-1 by the end of this month. And that means the Vikings could have the NFC North sewn up and their ticket to the playoffs punched.

It’s been a fun week in Winnipeg, made even more fun by Winnipeg drivers who need a little NASCAR fix and the local mainstream media who just can’t stop taking out all their frustrations on the only person who has the guts to call them what they are — belligerent, obnoxious, childish, ignorant and thin-skinned.

1) Blue Bombers head coach Mike Kelly made them all crazy again, just by saying he’ll be back next season. They whined and moaned and cried and bitched. Even the ones who have never, ever interviewed Kelly, screamed for his firing.

Then the hypocrisy of the local media mob reached comical levels.

Remember when the Bombers got to 7-9 and suddenly the local media made Manny Matzakis the darling of the masses. According to the tall foreheads with the cameras and microphones, Kelly had nothing to do with the team’s resurgence and it was all Matzakis.

Then, after the Bombers were drilled in the final two games of the season, Matzakis suddenly got a pass. The lousy offence wasn’t his fault, it was Kelly’s. Nowhere in the local media was Matzakis even mentioned as a culprit.

The smartest thing anyone in Winnipeg can do is this: Don’t believe a thing you read in a newspaper. They’re just making it up.

2) I love NASCAR for plenty of reasons, but this is the biggest: There are no turn signals on the cars. In Winnipeg, turn signals are the most frightening things you can give a driver.

Seems that in this town we have two types of drivers: the ones who turn on their signals and then never make the turn and the ones who don’t turn on their turn signals until they’re in the middle of an intersection, backing up traffic for blocks.

No wonder Manitoba Public Insurance pays out hundreds of millions of dollars in claims each year.

3) This is why I love it when the Green Bay Packers lose. The franchise is run by a heartless GM and an ignorant, heartless head coach…

According to the Associated Press: “A maintenance employee who’s worked for the Green Bay Packers for more than two decades was fired after making a comment to head coach Mike McCarthy.”

WTMJ radio then reported on Friday that 53-year-old Mike Wood was sitting in a maintenance cart in a stadium tunnel a few days before the Minnesota Vikings visited Lambeau Field. As McCarthy talked to members of the ground crew, Wood says he yelled out to McCarthy to “get the boys ready to kick some butt this weekend.”

A few days later, Wood was fired from the franchise he loves.

Wood says his supervisors thought he told McCarthy not to lay an egg, or something similar which Wood says was a lie. McCarthy said he didn’t fire the maintenance worker, but my insiders say he told the maintenance department to run the guy out of the organization.

Can’t wait to watch that paranoid Packer organization lose again. Those clowns need to worry a lot more about their offensive line and a lot less about the maintenance department.

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Favre says he “feels like a Jet.” So much for 16 years in Green Bay.

Posted on August 18, 2008 by Scott Taylor| Comments Off

Thanks to the NFL Network for telecasting Saturday night’s battle between the New York Jets and the Washington Redskins. It was worth the watch.

 

Granted, it wasn’t worth the watch after the first quarter, but, hey, that first 45 minutes as we got to witness Brett Favre in a New York Jets uniform was certainly worth the time commitment.

 

Our man Flava Favre told the New York media that he was “having fun again,” and one can certainly understand why. The Jets will be a pretty good football team with Favre’s competitive fire and quick release at the helm.

 

It also doesn’t hurt that his offensive line is at least decent, if not actually quite good.  

 

During the post-game news conference, Favre said he asked Jets head coach Eric Mangini to let him play some more. When the first quarter was over, Favre was done, but in his own mind he felt like a rookie trying to get a shot at the clipboard-carrier’s job. He was like that 23-year-old sixth-round draft pick right out of Southern Mississippi Wesleyan Agriculture, Teaching, Military and Firearms College. He wanted to play an entire pre-season game. That’s nuts. That’s Favre.

“I asked him if I could play some more and he (Mangini) said, ‘Let me think about it,’” Favre told the media. “As he turned away, he turned back and said, ‘I thought about it.’”

Favre didn’t play again. But he looked pretty comfortable when he did play.

Ol’ Flava Favre had obviously learned the better part of his new playbook. He went five-for-six passing for 48 yards and threw a four-yard touchdown strike to Dustin Keller. When he left the game, the Jets were ahead 7-0 and Favre, only 10 days removed from the Packers, was the best player in a Jets uniform.

“It worked out better than I thought it would,” Favre said at the news conference. “Not that I thought it would go badly.”

Admitting that it was all just “a little weird” to be suited up in Jets green while playing at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands, Favre lasted 14 plays and according to the Associated Press, Mangini said Favre had between 30 and 40 plays to work with.

Favre is going to be just fine in New York and the Jets just might give the Patriots a bit of an argument this season. 

In the meantime, the San Francisco 49ers massacred Favre’s old team, the Green Bay Packers, 34-6, on Saturday night. Aaron Rodgers went nine-for-16 for 58 yards, Brian Brohm went four-for-nine for 33 yards and Matt Flynn went five-for-six for 33 yards. Rodgers was sacked four times and the 49ers finished the game with six sacks in total.

At this stage, Packers GM Ted Thompson looks like a moron. He’s the guy who drafted Rodgers, he’s the guy who refused to trade for Randy Moss, he’s the guy who wanted Favre out. The Packers might never recover from Thompson’s ego and idiocy.

Meanwhile, the Jets and their fans are wandering the streets of the Big Apple loving every minute of Favre’s exile in New York.

I wonder if Packers coach Mike McCarthy ever looked in the mirror and said to himself, “Am I better off with Brett Favre as my No. 1 quarterback and Aaron Rodgers as my No. 2 or with Aaron Rodgers as No. 1 and Brian Brohm as No. 2?”

Guess not, because if he did, he wouldn’t have made that silly statement that Brett Favre “wasn’t in the right frame of mind” to play for the Packers. 

Poor Green Bay. All by themselves, they made Detroit and Minnesota the teams to beat in the NFC North. 

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The end of Week 7 in the CFL: Changes must be made in Winnipeg, Saskatchewan no longer undefeated and a great running game means big wins.

Posted on August 9, 2008 by Scott Taylor| Comments Off

This week home teams split with visiting teams, the Saskatchewan Roughriders finally lost and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are so bad, it’s now time for a complete overhaul — at the top, not the bottom.

 

Because there are no crossover games again until Labour Day Weekend, the West continues to dominate the East, 10-2. In terms of home teams, however, it was a split this week. Hamilton and B.C. won at home, Saskatchewan lost and Winnipeg got its collective butt handed to it. The season total is now 17-11 in favour of home teams (17-7 if you remove the West’s victories in Eastern buildings).

 

Now to the trends. Hamilton is not as bad as we think, but Toronto could be as bad as we thought. At 36, Anthony Calvillo is the best quarterback in the CFL. No team will go 18-0, but you have to give that banged-up Roughriders side some credit (Five starters have broken legs for gawd’s sake!). They don’t quit and they are very well coached. And finally, with all the injuries in Regina, it’s very likely the West will not be settled until the final week of the season. 

 

Let’s look a little more closely at what we saw in Week 7…

 

1. Call it the Curse of Troy Westwood. The bad karma in Winnipeg is wafting through a stadium that just might be in the final months of its existence. From the day Doug Berry humiliated Troy Westwood in public, the Bombers’ karma has been lost. So, too, has Barry’s locker room — despite what the players like to tell the local papers. When Berry went public in order to make Westwood look like a fool and cut him at 10 p.m. on a Saturday, the gods of football looked down on Berry and said, “Enough already!.” Berry’s hand-picked successor to Westwood, young Alexis Serna is not very good, but putting him in that situation wasn’t fair either (even Westwood conceded the kid was a good kicker, but Westwood should have been kept around to punt). Sadly, Berry’s constant berating (OK, swearing at on national TV) of the kid has made him worse. Serna is now 14-for-22 (63 per cent) in field goals and is dead last in punting at 32 yards net (the first Bomber in 35 years to be last in punting). It’s sad, but on Friday night, you could see the rest of the Bombers hang their heads every time he missed a  field goal. Meanwhile, it doesn’t help that the offence is a joke. If you don’t run the football in the CFL, you can’t win and the coach’s pal, Kit Cartwright, won’t run the football. In Winnipeg, it’s time to make substantive changes or this team has no chance. Amazingly, even at 1-6, this team still has a chance if those substantive changes are made now.

 

2. Not to belabour the Winnipeg issue, but It would also help if the Bombers hired Mike McCarthy (whom the National Post reports is selling cars in Hamilton) to assist GM Brendan Taman. His expertise is more important to the future of this team than an airlift of expensive NFL cuts. Mike McCarthy is the best unemployed CFL GM in the country. Since the Ticats gassed him, they’ve been pretty lousy. 

3. You have to love what Marc Trestman, with no CFL experience, has done with the Montreal Alouettes. The Als are 4-3 and in first place in the East. However, one thing is troubling. All four of their wins have come against Winnipeg and Hamilton. The Als have beaten 2-5 Hamilton 33-10 and 40-33 and have beaten 1-6 Winnipeg 38-24 and 39-11. The Als have lost 23-19 at home to Calgary, 41-33 in Saskatchewan and 36-34 in B.C. the first-place Als are the statistical reason why four teams from the West and only two teams from the East will make the playoffs.

4. Although Anthony Calvillo has been damn good, it’s pretty tough to think of anyone other than Saskatchewan’s Wes Cates as the CFL’s most outstanding player. In seven weeks — the seven weeks in which the Roughriders have gone 6-1 with three different starting quarterbacks — Cates has carried 110 times for 652 yards and seven touchdowns (tops in the CFL). He’s caught 24 passes for 274 yards and another touchdown. And he’s second in the league in total yards from scrimmage (behind Montreal’s Avon Cobourne) with 924. He — along with Cobourne, and Calgary’s Joffrey Reynolds — is proof that if you get the ball to your No. 1 runningback on a regular basis, you will win more often than you lose.

5. Need proof that the CFL’s offences woke up after a wonky Week 1? How ’bout this? Late Friday night, the 28-27 first-half Lions advantage over Edmonton was the highest halftime score in any Lions game since 1994. This week, the CFL office in Toronto proudly released the following numbers: Heading into Week 7, touchdowns were up 19.2 per cent from the end of Week 6 in 2007; overall scoring was up 9.8 per cent (Whatever that means?)  and total penalties are down from 542 last year to 425 this year. Now, if the league can just make challenges move faster and then find a way cut out all the four-minute commercial breaks on TSN, this game would be perfect.

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Things that make you go, hmmmmmm….

Posted on July 15, 2008 by Scott Taylor| Comments Off

On an almost daily basis, someone in the American media will write a column hailing 2008 as being, perhaps, sport’s greatest year.

 

From Nadal’s muscular win at Wimbledon to Tiger’s gimpy victory at Torrey Pines, the American media believes it isin the midst of actually living sport’s “Good ol’ days.”

 

Which, of course, may very well be true. But for all the wonderful stories — the Giants Super Bowl win, the Red Wings dominant Stanley Crown, the Celtics old school win over the Lakers in the NBA final and the emergence of Manny Pacquiao of the Philippines as the greatest pound-for-pound boxer on the planet — 2008 has also left us with enough goofiness to fill a book.

 

Of course, it wouldn’t be a novel, ’cause you can’t make this crap up… 

 

Canseco a Bashed Brother

 

Jose Canseco took steroids, fought with wives, wrote a couple of interesting books and hit a load of home runs, but he wasn’t ready for the fight he got in Atlantic City last weekend. 

 

The 6-foot-4 former tater pounder from Miami who calls himself, “a martial arts specialist” was knocked into next week by 5-foot-9, former Philadelphia Eagles kick returner Vai Sikahema, in the first round, no less, of their celebrity boxing match at an Atlantic City casino.

This fight wasn’t fair. Sikahema, who doubles as a sportscaster, has had more than 80 fights as an amateur boxer while, based on his history Canseco has only had a couple of bar grawls.

Apparently, Juiced and Juiced II didn’t sell all that well. Jose apparently needed an extra payday. The shot to the head he took from Sikahema wasn’t likely as embarrassing as the fact Canseco found himself in this predicament in the first place.

Favre denied Release. 

After watching Brett Favre’s interview with Fox’s Greta van Susteren on Monday night, it became apparent that saying, “Sport is a business,”is just a pleasant way of saying, “We really want to screw over a guy, but hey it’s just business, nothing personal.” I experienced that sentiment first-hand in the media business and if people just wanted to tell the truth they’d say, “We want to screw over the guy because we can.”  

Sure, Favre screwed up his retirement deal, but let’s be honest with each other: Did we ever believe for a second that he was really going to retire? The last pass he threw in that playoff game against the Giants, the one that was intercepted, was never going to be the final pass he threw as an NFL quarterback. Never. Favre was coming back and one senses that the Packers expected he’d be coming back, too.

So favre decides he wants to come back — as everyone expected he would — and now the Packers say, we’ve decided to go another way and have maded Aaron Rodgers the No. 1 quarterback. Favre says, “Hey, no problem, give me my release and I’ll be on my way.” But then, the Packers come back with some nonsense about “preserving Brett’s legacy,” and say, “We they don’t plan to grant Brett the release he is seeking from his contract but we are committed to Aaron Rodgers as the starter.” Oh, oh.

GM Ted Thompson and head coach Mike McCarthy went on to tell AP: “We’ve communicated that to Brett, that we have since moved forward. At the same time, we’ve never said that there couldn’t be some role that he might play here. But I would understand his point that he would want to play.”

Yeah, right. If these guys truly believed Aaron Rodgers was any good, they’d release Favre and let Rodgers take the ball and, well, run with it, metaphorically. Instead, they aren’t sure about Rodgers and even less sure about Favre, so they’ll cover their behinds and make sure Favre doesn’t go anywhere. Especially to a place like Chicago or Minnesota where he could come back and bite them in the ass.

Don’t ever believe for one split second that the Packers care about Brett Favre’s legacy. The Packers care about the Packers and the team’s coach and GM care about themselves first and their veteran quarterback a distant second — as all football men do. In the greatest of team games, there is no one more selfish than a football executive.

If the boys in Green Bay really cared about Brett Favre, they’d either announce he’s their starter or they’d let him go. After all, he’s earned it. He’s played hurt. He played after his dad died. As one scribe suggested, “He’s always played for the moment, not the money. There are bits and pieces of his body all over Lambeau Field.”

After what Favre has accomplished in Green Bay, he should have the right to determine his own future. If the people who run the Packers decide that he’s no longer in their plans, they should act like human beings, not dicks, and just let him go. Or, at least, they should make a legitimate effort to trade him, an effort they don’t appear to be making.

Why All-Star Games are a Waste.

Personally, I love Major League Baseball’s all-star game.

In fact, one of the wonderful things about the great game of baseball is that its all-star games are exactly as advertised – real games, played at the highest level of skill.

 

Football and hockey all-star games just aren’t the same because no one wants to get hurt in a game that doesn’t matter in the standings so the inherent violence that sports fans love is all but removed from the equation. Basketball all-star games don’t work because, hey, who really wants to play defence?

 

But baseball? Baseball is different. The nature of the game alone is an invitation to get out onto the diamond and give it your best shot. Throw it, catch it, hit it. Ballplayers love to show the fans how well they play and when it’s all-star time, those stars shine.

 

“You wanna see an unhittable slider? Watch this!”

 

“You wanna see if I can hit it in the river? Well then, show me the cheese, meat!”

 

However, to make an all-star baseball game truly great, you have to have real all-stars in the game. This year, MLB has, as they say, dropped the ball.

 

No Diasuke Matsuzaka. The Red Sox ace, who has overcome injuries and even gone back to A-ball to rehab, is now 10-1 with a 2.65 earned run average. That’s an all-star, but he wasn’t selected to play in the game.

 

No Kyle Lohse. One of three aboriginal Americans in the Majors, Lohse is having a remarkable comeback season. He’s 11-2 with a 3.39 ERA and is one of the big reasons the Cards are in the hunt in the NL Central. He’s an all-star but he’s not in the game.

 

And there is no Ryan Howard. Oh, spare me. Howard leads the National League in home runs and RBI. He’s the biggest run producer in the NL, but he’s not in the game. First time since Hank Bauer in 1945, that the league’s No. 1 homer and RBI man is not in the all-star game. That’s just stupid. Idiot Clint Hurdle and his National League pretenders deserve to lose tonight’s game.

 

You can also go on about Placido Palanco, Mike Mussina, Xavier Nady, Magglio Ordonez and Jermaine Dye, but that’s just picking nits. The fact is, while baseball’s all-star game is the best of a mediocre lot, it loses what lustre it has left when some of the real all-stars are off playing golf.

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