Matt LaFleur rolled off the Sean McVay assembly line chrome-shiny and shock-sprung, a fine piece of two-door football machinery that looked built for bombing down the fast lane to the promised land. He wasn’t the flashiest ride on the lot. However, he was a new model, equipped not just with the familiar bells and whistles but self-activating adaptive cruise control, dual-clutch transmission, and digital HUD display.
How could Green Bay Packers fans not be at least a little excited when they saw him gleaming in the driveway? They’d been stuck all these years riding with Mike McCarthy, the head-coach equivalent of a beige 2012 Honda Odyssey with coffee-stained cloth interior trim, half a small order’s worth of fries lost between the armrest and the front seats, and a sun-bleached Garfield suction-cupped to the rear window. Mike McCarthy could get you places, but he was never quite firing on all cylinders, the gears would grind going uphill, and you usually had to push your way for the last few blocks.
“God love the car,” the novelist Harry Crews wrote. “It has shown the naked heart that lives in all of us.”
What Packers’ fans enthusiasm revealed was a desire for change and a need for speed. By 2018, McCarthy’s 2010 Super Bowl season was a blur in the rearview mirror. He was coming off his first losing season since 2008 — the Aaron Rodgers’ transition year — and was on a trajectory for a third sub-.500 record when Green Bay let him go following a Week 13 loss.
It wasn’t just the one or two losing seasons that defined the McCarthy era, nor even their Super Bowl victory, but the successive years of missed turns and wasted time. According to the numbers, there was plenty of horsepower — 15-1, 11-5, 8-7, 12-4, 10-6, and 10-6 records in succession look pretty good on paper at the dealership — but he could rarely go fast enough to keep up with the high-performance machines. These were Aaron Rodgers’ prime years, as anyone with a valid Wisconsin driver’s license could tell you, and McCarthy was wasting them stalled out in mediocrity.
LaFleur was supposed to be the answer to all those prayers to Dashboard Jesus. Despite some mixed reactions and his somewhat shallow track record — Skip Bayless called him “a pushover,” and Colin Cowherd questioned his ability to command a meeting room — but his early success quickly endeared him. He was a chip off the old engine block of his mentor McVay, who was hailed as the prototype of the modern NFL coach. McVay’s former offensive coordinator would find a new gear for Aaron Rodgers, tune up the rickety defense and special teams, and carry Green Bay from the age of pop-out cigarette lighters to electric-hybrid self-driving.
And that promise seemed fulfilled, sort of. The stat-lines of LaFleur’s first three years of coaching became as familiar and rigid as the Rules of the Road. Three 13-win seasons, never lost in December, never lost back-to-back games. Oh, and he took the governor off Aaron Rodgers en route to successive MVP seasons.
Yet, four years into his tenure, Matt LaFleur is starting to look like a Mike McCarthy engine in a sports car frame.
Those 13-win seasons? Two ignominious exits from the NFC Championship round, followed by another playoff dud against the San Francisco 49ers. And it’s not just the results of the races, it’s all the familiar problems you see when you look under the hood. The mediocre defenses. The terrible special-teams play. The refusal to seek outside help, and the over-reliance on familiar faces.
One of the hallmarks of McCarthy’s time in Green Bay was his inability to oversee a genuinely good defense. The defense finished as a top-10 unit just twice during his tenure. So far in four years, LaFleur’s defense has barely sneaked into the top 10 once, so he’s keeping McCarthy as a pace car there too.
More echos of McCarthy’s sputtering motor: the constant reshuffling of this year’s offensive line. Of course, injuries played a huge part in that. Still, LaFleur’s McCarthy-esque bumbling of player substitutions, under-utilizing younger talents, and failure to put his guys in their optimal spot to succeed was a problem for most of 2022, as noted by Zone Coverage’s own Wendell Ferreira.
Of course, LaFleur’s more interesting play-calling is a step up from McCarthy’s often stodgy schemes. And one of the few major areas of improvement for the team on LaFleur’s watch has been the emergence of a competent special teams unit, ending the three-car pileup of Ron Zook, Shawn Mennenga, and Maurice Drayton. Green Bay finally hired a highly sought-after ace in Rich Bisaccia, who had no historic ties with the Packers. He was just a nifty new piece from a whole other shop who gave the team a burst of energy like Dominic Toretto’s NOS booster.
LaFleur’s recent comments about “not anticipating” major changes to the coaching staff are reminiscent of exactly the kind of stuck-in-the-mud mentality he was supposed to change. You don’t have to bleed cheddar and burp Spotted Cow to know that defensive coordinator Joe Barry is an old tire going flat. Yet here we are, watching LaFleur slowly swerve into a ditch. This is exactly how you turn a top-10 defense into a distant fantasy.
So many of the features on the 2022 LaFleur look like familiar flaws from the old model. Watch him struggle to control his team from the sideline as Rasul Douglas commits his baffling neutral-zone penalty and Quay Walker doubles down on one of the stupidest infractions of the year. When the going really gets tough, LaFleur looks like another helpless passenger in a car driven by a star quarterback out of sync with the strategy of upper management. His stubborn loyalties, his fits of gridiron conservatism, his publicly nebulous relationship with No. 12 — it’s all familiar scenery.
Harry Crews, who knew a lot about the mystique of the automobile, also wrote:
I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bull**** . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we’ll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can’t do it—you can’t bull****. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.
There was a lot of big talk about new features and higher performance when Matt LaFleur came to Green Bay. The expectations were clear, but the last four years, in retrospect, look an awful lot like the decade prior. The Packers are stalled out, with no indication of running efficiently any time soon. Now that LaFleur’s new-car smell has worn off, he’s starting to feel suspiciously like the same second-class ride.
