Well, the NFL is off and running. Let’s see how long it lasts.
In the meantime, there are a couple of teams I’m going to watch this year. Of course, the Green Bay Packers – the greatest franchise in NFL (and maybe all of sporting) history. And the Dallas Cowboys – a team that thinks it’s the greatest franchise in NFL history.
But I’m not watching the Cowboys out of my typical desire to mock them and their fans (all light-heartedly – and they take it well, because, of course, they’ve had so much practice over the past quarter century). No. There’s a new factor in the game and for me it’s rather neutral in its effect on how I feel about the Cowboys. That factor is their new head coach, former Packer head coach Mike McCarthy.
Now we Green Bay fans have a lot of love for McCarthy. He did, after all, lead the team to a Super Bowl victory in 2010. But he’s also the coach who, along with an incompetent General Manager who got lucky when Aaron Rodgers fell to 24 in the 2005 NFL draft, pretty much wasted the best years of one of the game’s greatest players by calling one of the most vanilla-bland offenses in the league. Sure, they rode the coattails of Rodgers for most of the time since there Super Bowl win in order to look respectable (and another testament to the GM’s inability to actually find and keep the quality they needed to return to the big game), but you could practically set your clock to the predictability of McCarthy’s play calling.
So of course I need to watch the Cowboys, mostly to see if McCarthy has changed.
And following their week one loss to the Rams, from what I could see, the answer is “no.” Same old stuff. Nothing new. Nothing interesting. While other teams are running more complex schemes – motions, pitches, end-arounds (ends-around?), screens – McCarthy is simply throwing the ball, running the ball, throwing the ball, throwing the ball, running the ball. He’s still relying too exclusively on the talent he has to make the simplest plays work without giving that talent an added dimension that will make them unbeatable. And that just can’t work in the long run.
And I’m good with that…