NFL Reactions: Rodgers' Road Ahead

It's too bad that it took until Week 13 of the 2018 season for the Packers front office to reach the realization, but an almost inconceivable Lambeau Field loss to the previously 2-8 Cardinals finally convinced Green Bay to move on from Mike McCarthy, whose 20-17 stumble against Arizona was just too much to stomach despite the years of rationalized failure preceding it.

With the concession that McCarthy was unfit for the head coaching role comes the painful acknowledgment of many wasted prime years of Aaron Rodgers, whose Sunday struggles were too great to be explained by the difficult weather alone. He somehow finished 31-of-50 for 233 yards (4.7 YPA) and one touchdown at the field where his career splits feature 262 yards (8.1 YPA) and 2.3 passing touchdowns per game. Rodgers probably isn't declining yet, but to see him struggle with such little hope in Lambeau of all places gave the Packers a terrifying reminder of the fact that even Rodgers will face physical decline eventually, and maybe it took those specific optics of Rodgers looking helpless at home to make clear just how doomed they'd be if McCarthy were still coach when Rodgers is no longer superhuman. No matter what fears came with the idea of dismissing a 13-year coach, the worst-case scenarios just don't seem as compelling when you're losing at home to the Steve Wilks Cardinals in the present.

From 2007 to 2016 the Packers made the playoffs an incredible nine out of 10 years, including six first-place finishes in the NFC North. One of those playoff seasons were with Brett Favre as starter, while Rodgers was responsible for the other eight. It was reasonable to attribute much of the success to McCarthy, and maybe it would even be correct to do so. But few coaches have done a worse job of adjusting to the changes in the game in recent years, and McCarthy's inability to crack the changing formulas makes one wonder if McCarthy ever cracked anything in the first place, or if the bar was just lower in those days. Passing games won back then by having better players who won individual matchups, whereas the emerging paradigm is one where teams are leveraging the illegal contact rule changes into overloading defensive resources at specific attack points, setting picks versus man coverage and flooding zone coverages to break their assignment designs.

McCarthy drew criticism for too many anecdotal instances of questionable in-game management, but it's probably his scheming and playcalling that caused the most cumulative damage to the Packers over the years. It didn't matter so much ten years ago when we were all even dumber, but most of the league got a bit smarter since then while McCarthy proved incurious toward the idea of revisiting his increasingly obsolete system. Whereas with coaches like Sean McVay and Sean Payton you see play calls designed with specific attack points in mind, McCarthy's offense was one were everyone is basically asked to win one-on-one battles while Rodgers was otherwise tasked with just guessing who might get open on a basis that's random by design. McCarthy's play constructions were almost literally void of strategy, more like a bill served to Rodgers than a plan to empower him. I guess you needn't even look to McVay or Payton – the contrast between McCarthy's schemes and those of first-year NFC North coach Matt Nagy are staggering.

With McCarthy you don't see any specific theory to any play design, so instead of route combinations with the calculated aim of creating specific vulnerabilities in the defense, you have an arbitrary selection of unrelated routes. You didn't see much pre-snap motion, and almost never saw routes cross each other, let alone the utilization of pick concepts that all of the best offenses use. That's why Rodgers seemed so dependent on broken plays – it was often the case that the play needed to fail before he could begin to save it. It's a needlessly dangerous way to run an offense.

I'd add a section lamenting the Aaron Jones saga, but we only have so much time and rage is bad for you.

The timing and general circumstances of the firing are unfortunate, because it's unlikely to solve any of Green Bay's issues in the short term, meaning it might not provide much relief for Rodgers' tormented fantasy owners. If Green Bay had fired McCarthy this offseason they might have locked up a playoff seed by now, but all they can do at this point is hand over the team to Joe Philbin, who already failed as a head coach in Miami and is basically an apprentice of McCarthy's. Hopefully this offseason the Packers make an inspired hire who can salvage Rodgers' few remaining years, at least.

• Jordan Howard had his best game in a while, yet he was still decidedly unimpressive in it, his 76 yards on 16 carries buoyed mostly by a 25-yard run where the defense kind of just gave up the gap. Taquan Mizzell got involved early again, and Tarik Cohen might push for more consistent work after putting forth the best game of his young career. Howard used to show more shiftiness and did a better job of converting his anchor into power, but this year he's been incredibly sluggish to the point that I wonder if he has a bad ankle or loses a split second in the reads the Nagy system calls for that John Fox never did. I feel like Howard will bounce back eventually, but I have to admit I don't think it will be in Chicago, and certainly not this year in any case. Nagy is obsessed with versatility and the pass-catching Mizzell could gain snaps even if Cohen does also, and it all has to be at Howard's expense.

• Trey Burton is another Chicago disappointment for whom things might only get worse. He didn't catch his lone target in the game, and while Burton has been efficient and explosive relative to his usage, he seems merely a peripheral threat in the offense. Adam Shaheen looked graceless on his touchdown catch, but trust that he is very talented and is simply too useful to disappear. The Bears are remarkably deep and versatile at the skill positions, which will ultimately prove annoying in fantasy football. Mitch Trubisky would need to throw for 5,000 yards to make the investors of all of Burton, Shaheen, Allen Robinson, Taylor Gabriel, Anthony Miller, and Cohen happy next year.

• Almost nothing Josh Allen does seems sustainable to me, but I sincerely admire his enthusiastic commitment to a kamikaze style of play. If his career doesn't work out, it certainly won't be due to lack of resolve. I really don't think he can ever be accurate but he's feeling the field better than I expected him to, and there's no doubt his combination of arm strength and athleticism stretch the defense thin with the amount of ground he can threaten. I feel like there's a humorous irony with Allen in that his biggest fans were old-school coaches who probably consider Drew Bledsoe the perfect quarterback, yet his best application in the NFL game is as a post-modern application similar to that of Lamar Jackson, the quarterback who Allen's NFL proponents probably identified with least among this year's notable rookie quarterbacks. The ideal Allen offense is probably one where you just give him as many 4.3 receivers as possible and call four verts every play.

• Robert Foster dipped back into obscurity for the Bills, but Zay Jones overcame an early drop to post a promising box score of four catches for 67 yards and two touchdowns on nine targets. Jones has largely been written off due to his disastrous rookie year and bizarre offseason off-field incident, but if his head is right he's a very good prospect. It's easy to forget that Jones is a great athlete rather than a good one, and his reputation as a strictly underneath guy just isn't really correct. He'll be difficult to use in fantasy until next year at least, but Jones has eight or more targets in four of his last seven games and he's really starting to flash lately with the increased usage.

• The Broncos should trade Royce Freeman this offseason. He's a good prospect but Phillip Lindsay turned out to be a great one, and the crazy thing is Lindsay hasn't even gotten going as a pass catcher yet for the Broncos. Lindsay is a superb pass catcher. He's worth his skyrocketed price in dynasty because he has 70-catch upside eventually.

• Baker Mayfield seemingly regressed a bit with three interceptions in a 29-13 loss that wasn't nearly as close as the score implies, but it's a great sign that Mayfield was still explosive despite the turnovers, completing 67.4 percent of his passes at 9.2 YPA. If this is what his bad days look like – on the road and against an intimidating pass rush, moreover – he's going to be a monster.

• Jarvis Landry finally bounced back with six catches for 103 yards on nine targets, but considering Mayfield threw 40 passes it might be fool's gold. On a day where Mayfield throws for over 350 yards, Landry should be securing 120-150.

• The Indianapolis-Jacksonville game is one of the most bizarre box scores I can recall. The Colts had something real to play for, yet if you looked just at the numbers from this game you might have wondered if it were a Week 17 game where the No. 1 seed benched everyone against the team projected for the No. 1 overall pick. I would try to sell Nyheim Hines in dynasty leagues because I remain skeptical he has the open-field running skills necessary to make his speed manifest in the box score. He's averaging 4.1 yards per carry on the year and while he's catching almost everything thrown his way (81.7 percent catch rate) he's doing nothing with the catches, averaging 5.0 yards per target. Same stuff that happened at North Carolina State. If he proves me wrong it will probably be because he's still young for his level, having turned 22 not even a month ago.

• Cam Newton was having an awesome season as of a few weeks ago, but four interceptions against the Buccaneers when you have a 6-5 record is just brutal. I'm not going to blame him for Carolina's failed ambitions this year -- that would be Ron Rivera's credit -- but Cam had a layup's chance to transcend the circumstances and he instead sank.

• It was nice to see Curtis Samuel get more involved, and I'm convinced he's better than Devin Funchess, but it took Funchess playing limited snaps due to his back injury for Samuel to get his 11 targets.

• Jameis Winston had a superb game in a setting where things could have easily gone wrong given the wind and Carolina's greater stake in the outcome. Switching DeSean Jackson (thumb) with Chris Godwin probably helped Winston, because Godwin has a complete game while Jackson's deep route prowess largely goes to waste with Winston's intermediate tendencies. One of Dirk Koetter's greatest failures is his weird reluctance to feed Godwin, who's almost certainly a top-40 receiver in terms of actual skill. He'll only be 23 at the end of February, yet Godwin's career box score to date screams of impending dominance. His 116 targets have yielded 78 receptions for 1,100 yards and five touchdowns. That's 9.5 yards per target at a 67.2 completion rate – basically automatic by wideout standards.

• Kenny Golladay was a disappointment in a game where Detroit fell behind relatively early and never caught back up, seeing eight targets but only catching three for 50 yards. Things must feel uneasy in Detroit – Matt Patricia only retained Jim Bob Cooter because it was politically problematic to let him go, but going into this offseason Patricia probably sees JBC as a useful scapegoat. I don't think either one is any good, but Patricia made this offense worse than it was under JBC's sole discretion. I wouldn't chase Levine Toilolo's numbers in this one (four catches for 90 yards on six catches), but one of my favorite inconsequential anecdotes is the fact that Toilolo started over Zach Ertz at Stanford before suffering a torn ACL way back in 2010.

• I remain intensely optimistic for Lamar Jackson's NFL future, but I'd expect Baltimore to at least implement a rotation between him and Joe Flacco (hip) next week, presuming Flacco's return, and Flacco could easily return to the starting role outright.

• Every single indicator strongly implied that Mark Andrews was a better prospect than Hayden Hurst, yet Baltimore took Hurst in the first and Andrews in the third. Projecting skill development based on athleticism and intangibles is one thing, but you shouldn't be doing that with 25-year-old prospects like Hurst, and definitely not in the first round. Anyway, Andrews is better and an easy call was somehow made complicated.

• Spencer Ware was disappointing given how favorable the setting was against Oakland, but Hunt had his lulls earlier this year and always made up for lost time because it's just categorically impossible to fail as the feature back in an offense that scores this much. Ware should still be a kingmaker in fantasy playoffs, though it's also true that Damien Williams is a sensible lottery ticket pickup in the meantime.

• Jordy Nelson has been efficient and explosive all year on a per-target basis, yet he's been invisible aside from his big game against Miami. You see him turn 11 targets into ten catches for 97 yards today and it's difficult to understand why it didn't happen all year.

• I still don't trust him or his team one bit, but it was nice to see Marcus Mariota have his second strong game in a row, though three sacks on 35 pass attempts is once again a problematic pressure rate. The Titans offensive line was supposed to be a strength. I have no insight on the Derrick Henry vs. Dion Lewis question. Like the Titans generally, nothing that has happened with either of those two this year makes any sense to me. I still think they're both good players, but the application this year can only be described as "dissociative."

• Taywan Taylor's prospect profile emphatically declares him capable of games like his big one today, but like most Titans he's burned me so badly this year I just can't get excited even though he did well today. There's no reason he can't be a Stefon Diggs-type player.

• Speaking of Diggs, it's remarkable how the Minnesota offense and Kirk Cousins specifically collapsed against the Patriots, even as Diggs toughed out a knee injury. Dalvin Cook needs more work in this offense, but ten targets for 22 yards isn't a good enough job of getting him into space.

• The 49ers offense as a whole might be the strangest outcome of this whole slate. Nick Mullens was a disaster in his two starts prior to this one, but against the surging Seahawks of all teams he goes off for 414 yards and two touchdowns. Perhaps he was buoyed by the much-overlooked Homecoming Narrative for Dante Pettis, who dazzled in front of his former home crowd for five catches for 129 yards and two touchdowns on seven targets. Pettis is a great dynasty investment because even though his route running gives him a good application in the slot, his springy nature and underrated high-point ability give him vastly superior red-zone projections compared to most slot receivers.

• Jeffery Wilson may be an unknown, but as he showed stepping into the place of Matt Breida (ankle) today, Wilson can play. He was profoundly injury prone at North Texas and his pro day numbers were disgusting, but he was always explosive for the Mean Green, even in the pre-Littrell days. He can't compete with Breida if healthy, but if Breida misses time then Wilson shouldn't be overlooked.