Category: Packers

Packers News has an interactive comparison of quarterbacking between the Bears and the Packers.

The latter has had three starting quarterbacks since 1992:

1. Brett Favre.
2. Aaron Rodgers.
3. Matt Flynn (once when Rodgers was concussed in 2010, and once at the end of the 2011 season).

In that time span, Da Bears have had 26 starting quarterbacks …

… starting with 1992 …

… and 1998, with three Bears starters …

… followed one year later with three different Bears starters …

… and three more in 2002 …

… and three in 2003 …

… followed by four a year after that …

… and, well, you get the idea.

But this is not a recent phenomenon. Before a 2007 Sunday NIght Football game (which is to say three quarterbacks ago, which is a low count by Bears standards), Keith Olbermann hilariously chronicled the Bears’ quarterback woes dating back to the 1950s, calling it “one of the NFL’s great unrecognized traditions. With brief interruptions of stability from the likes of Jim McMahon and Billy Wade, this job has been unsettled since Sid Luckman retired. There has always been a Rex Grossman, he has always underperformed, and they have always been about to replace him.”

Olbermann pointed out that the Bears drafted, and then got rid of, Hall of Fame quarterback Bobby Layne, and told 31-year-old George Blanda he was too old to play quarterback. That was in 1958, just before Blanda went to the American Football League and won two AFL titles. That was 12 years before Blanda played quarterback for the Oakland Raiders, at age 43. The number of Bears quarterbacks who have won NFL titles since the Bears introduced the T-formation include:

1. Sid Luckman (four titles between 1940 and 1946).
2. Billy Wade (1963).
3. Jim McMahon (Super Bowl XX).

Grossman somehow got Da Bears to a Super Bowl, but Da Bears reverted to traditional offensive form that night and lost. Da Bears acquired Jay Cutler in an effort to fix their decades-long quarterback issues.

Tonight, Josh McCown (not to be confused with Cade McNown) starts because Cutler has a groin injury. (Insert joke here.)

The Packers host Da Bears Monday night.

Packers–Bears is the oldest rivalry in the National Football League. I first came upon it when the Packers and Bears were at similar levels of ineptitude in the ’70s.

Then the Bears hired Mike Ditka and became one of the best teams of the 1980s.

Given their talent, the Bears probably should have won more than one Super Bowl.

I’ll have to read Rich Cohen’s new book, Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football when it goes on sale. For one thing, the Bears’ most successful years dovetail with the years they held their training camp at UW-Platteville.

GQ has one excerpt focusing on Da Coach, Mike Ditka, as a player …

The pieces of the 1985 Bears began to come together in 1939, when Mike Ditka was born in Carnegie, Pennsylvania. His parents had emigrated from Ukraine, where the family name was Dyczko, which each uncle Americanized in his own way, Disco being the least fortunate variation. It’s hard to imagine Mike Disco becoming anything but a dancing machine; Ditka was more appropriate for a son of Aliquippa, the tough west Pennsylvania factory town where he spent his formative years. The coach’s father worked as a welder in a steel mill, “a burner” on a train that ran through the factory that employed just about everyone in town. The old man would come home with blisters on his hands, wounds of a working life. He’d been a Marine and was a strict disciplinarian. “What he said, he said, that was it,” Ditka wrote. “He didn’t spare the rod.” Ditka’s autobiography is filled with phrases like “worst beating of my life.” “If I didn’t [do what he said],” wrote Ditka, “he gave me a hard time. By a hard time, I mean he simply whipped my ass.” Such poundings usually came in response to some bit of mischief. A neighbor once described young Mike Ditka as “a high intensity boy.” On one occasion, experimenting with cigarettes, he burned down a stand of trees behind the family house. When Ditka’s father came home, he wondered what had happened “to the forest.”

“Ask your son,” his wife told him.

“I got nailed,” Ditka wrote. “He had an old leather Marine belt. It was probably the hardest whipping I ever got.”

Some people, you see a picture of them taken in third or fourth grade, you have no idea who it is. Of course, when you’re told, the features reassemble themselves in a familiar way and you think, Oh yeah, now I see my friend. But with Ditka, you know right away: the chipmunk cheeks and broad forehead, the mouth turned fiercely down, the amused glint, the peaked, bearlike hairline—it was all there from the start. And the smile. Mike Ditka has a great smile. It wrinkles his cheeks and makes his eyes vanish. It’s a cute smile, surprisingly adorable in an otherwise tough face. In fact, it’s so cute it’s scary. If a bear smiled at you, that would be scary, too. You see a thing like that in the woods, you think, I’m done. …

When the Bears drafted Ditka first in 1961, it was with another idea in mind. Halas and his assistant, George Allen, wanted to put Ditka on the offensive line. He would block on most plays but now and then skirt away from the trenches, head downfield ten or fifteen yards, turn around, and catch a pass. Winning football games is not about pitting strength against strength, speed against speed. It’s about finding a mismatch, a situation in which their little guy has to tackle your monster, or their monster has to chase your sprinter. If Ditka got downfield, he’d be covered by defensive backs half his size. It was a strategy made possible only by Ditka’s special gift: Big guys almost never had such soft hands. In this way, Halas created what has since become a dominant weapon in the NFL: Mike Ditka was the first modern tight end. “Nobody threw to the tight end back then,” he told me. “He was just another guy on the line of scrimmage, next to the tackle. Then Halas had this idea to throw me the ball. He realized it was hard for me to get off the line when I was next to the tackle, so he moved me three or four yards down. I was the first tight end to flex out.” …

Ditka had the hands but caught the ball in the untutored way of the sandlot. Turning what you’ve always done by instinct into a practice, a trade—that’s what makes you a professional. Halas brought Sid Luckman back to work with Ditka, teach him the proper way to catch. Sid was forty-four years old, gray, soft, ancient, a figure of lore. He had a method, a way to concentrate the rookie. He gathered a pile of footballs and wrote a number on each: 27, 61, 33. Ditka ran pattern after pattern. As soon as he made a catch, he had to call out the number on the ball. This would teach him the art of high focus: just you and the ball, watching it all the way into your hands. In 1961, Ditka caught 56 passes for 1,076 yards. He scored twelve touchdowns. No tight end had ever done anything like it. He was named Rookie of the Year and made the Pro Bowl, an honor he would secure in each of his first four seasons.

It was not just the statistics that earned Ditka respect—it was how he played, the fierceness of his game. He answered every challenge, returned every insult. He tore it up. In his fifth game, the Bears played the Baltimore Colts, where Ditka faced Bill Pellington, one of the toughest linebackers in football. He’d knocked the Lions’ tight end Jim Gibbons out not long before. “So all week all I heard was how tough Bill Pellington was and how he was going to knock the crap out of me,” Ditka wrote later. “Well, I lined up on the first play from scrimmage and by God they were right. He punched me right in the mouth. I wore that little, thin bar [on my helmet] that didn’t protect anything. He punched me right in the mouth and I said, ‘Oh. Boy.’ On the next play— I don’t know what the play was—didn’t matter. I didn’t even care. I don’t know if it was a pass play or a run. I just gave him a head fake, drew back and punched him as hard as I could.”

In Green Bay, Ditka battled Packers Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke on the field and off. One night, after a rough game, they ran into each other in a restaurant. They started jawing back and forth. Then Nitschke pointed a big finger in Ditka’s face and said, “I’m going to get you.”

“If you get me, you better get me good,” said Ditka. “One thing in life you’ve got to remember is if you’re trying to get somebody, you don’t get got.” …

Halas taught Ditka the game: how to play, how to coach, when to praise, when to call the boys a bunch of cunts. Watching him operate was better than ten years in school. He was a wizard, a pioneer, but it was his attention to detail that really impressed. I mean, here was this guy, a founder of the NFL, a standout for Coach Zuppke, a man who stripped the ball from Jim Thorpe, and what’s he doing at age sixty-six? Weighing every kid on the roster, standing by with a clipboard, stopwatch, and pen. “Nobody weighed anybody except him,” Ditka said. “He didn’t trust anyone. We had to do it twice a week.” It was a $23 fine for every pound over. “The most fun anybody even had was the weigh-in. They used to trick the scales. The old man would go crazy. One guy would get on and another guy would put his finger under the cheek of his ass. Another guy would get on the scale with weights in his jockstrap.”

… and the Wall Street Journal has another focusing on the dysfunctional relationship between Ditka and his defensive coordinator, Buddy Ryan:

For Mike Ditka, it must have been maddening. He was the coach of the Chicago Bears but had little control over the defense—he could talk all he wanted but didn’t have the power to fire his defensive coordinator, Buddy Ryan, who had worked out a special deal with the team’s owner, George Halas. The result was a rift between offense and defense, a rift and a rivalry.

During an epic stretch in the 1980s, when the Bears won 35 regular season games and lost just three, the offense and defense traveled on separate buses, attended separate meetings, followed separate codes.

Ditka and Ryan were often at war. It wasn’t an act: These men truly hated each other. It was the energy behind everything; it was there at halftime, at the beginning and end of each practice and game. “Every now and again, when things weren’t going well on the field, Mike would come by and make some suggestions,” Ryan said. “I’d just tell him to go blank himself, and he’d turn around and walk off.”

In an unintended way, this dysfunction helped the Bears: As their offense and defense went after each other, every practice turned into a battle and the players drove each other to the heights of ferocity. Asked to name the best team he faced in 1985, Ditka said, “the Bears.”

“When you went out for a normal practice, you wouldn’t wear as many pads,” safety Doug Plank said, “but when Mike came to town and Buddy was the defensive coordinator, you went to every practice thinking, ‘You know what? A game could break out here at any moment. I’m taking everything.’ ”

Over time, a football team takes on the personality of its head coach. If he’s strong, the team will be strong. If he’s weak, the team will be ineffectual.

But what if he’s insane?

Standing behind a podium at his postgame news conferences, Ditka looked like a bear and behaved like a bear. His forehead was domed, and his close-set eyes burned. He shifted from side to side, taking his time, deciding which reporter to next raise up and beat down. If a question struck him as stupid, he would grunt and mutter, “Next.” He could make “next” sound like a nasty word. Now and then, watching on TV, you’d see a reporter raise his hand, then, fixed in the coach’s glare, lower it a little, then a little more, then drop it altogether and stare into his lap. If challenged, Ditka assumed the flat-faced puzzled expression of a bear in a documentary, a grizzly that has caught an interesting smell in the wind, that has reared back on his hind legs, paws dangling, searching for prey. Next. He was a Kodiak rooting through trash on the edge of a national park. He was a grizzly enraged by a swarm of bees.

If asked, after a loss, “What went wrong?” he might grimace and say, “You saw it. We stink.” Following an especially bad loss, he said, “I’d be surprised if we won another game.” But if the team won, the news conference was raucous. Ditka was still a bear, only now he was a happy bear shredding through picnic baskets at an ill-tended campsite in the Adirondacks.

Ditka was an expressive man, a fist pounder, less like the cerebral masters of the game than like his father, a union boss from western Pennsylvania. He would be calm one minute, then throw a clipboard the next. He said what he thought in the no-nonsense way of the political fixer. When I spoke to Bob Avellini, a Bears quarterback who battled with Ditka, he said, “If the people only knew the truth about their hero Iron Mike: He called plays like a drunken fan.”

Of course, they did know, and that is why they loved him. Ditka personified the town and its fans, many of whom were indeed drunk.

Former Bears general manager Jim Finks once described Ditka’s method as “Ready, Fire, Aim.” …

In 1978, when he joined the Bears’ Ryan was 45, a barrel-chested, theory-stuffed genius. He wore wire-frame glasses and was constantly sticking his finger in the faces of his players, yelling, smirking or brushing the sandy hair from his fierce eyes.

He knew all the tricks of the cult leader, how to sweeten the hours of pain with a scrap of praise, a hand on the neck, a tap on the helmet. In Chicago, he was at the center of worship. Charismatic, intense. You’d follow him to the edge of your strength and sanity because you wanted to be acknowledged. It didn’t matter where you were drafted or what you got paid: Buddy made you earn your spot. Everyone started at the bottom, where you were mocked and humiliated, name-called and worked over, until he could see you had broken and were ready to submit. Then he remade you into a killer, a kamikaze who would fly into the aircraft carrier.

“Buddy operated by numbers,” Plank said. “There were no names. You were either an adjective, and not a very complimentary one, or you were the number on your jersey. I was 46. Being a number was an honor. It meant you weren’t an adjective. Here comes this master sergeant from the Korean War and he started to develop and encourage pride in being part of a special unit, a defensive squad.”

In his first years in Chicago, Ryan was coaching mostly mediocre players. On many days, the Bears were outclassed. To compete, he had to improvise. “He was experimenting with defenses,” Plank said. “He was going wild, looking for some way to generate a pass rush. You’d go into a meeting and see a bunch of crazy formations on the board. He’d go through each and say, ‘OK, here’s what we’re going to try.’ And someone would say, ‘What do you call it?’ Buddy didn’t use X’s and O’s.

“When he put things on the board, it was numbers. He named formations after the number in the center of the formation. So one morning we go in and sure enough there’s a new defense with my number in the middle: the 46.”

In the standard 4-3 defensive alignment, the offense’s center usually wasn’t “covered,” meaning no one lined up directly in front of him. This usually allowed the center to double-team a pass-rusher. But Ryan moved a linebacker to the line of scrimmage, then shifted Plank into the gap left by that linebacker. This meant none of Ryan’s rushers could be double-teamed.

On a blitz in Ryan’s defense, another linebacker or safety might creep up to the line and hide behind a big defensive end. As a result, there were often more rushers than blockers, which is why, in 1985, it often looked as if the Bears had too many players on the field. Buddy called the hidden blitzers free runners. “Confuse the offense until they have no idea where you’re coming from—that is what creates a free runner,” Plank said. “A free runner is an unblocked defensive player, and he gets to the quarterback so much faster…When a free runner hits the quarterback, the quarterback flies through the air.”

In fulfilling an age-old playground fantasy, Ryan had decided to hell with it, and seemingly sent all his guys after the quarterback with a simple mission: Nail him. Rather than try to cover everyone, Ryan decided to short-circuit the offense by taking out the quarterback. As boxers used to say: Kill the brain, and the body will follow.

“Football is chess,” Plank said. “You can capture all my pawns, but if I tip over that king, I win.”

Another, from Sports Illustrated, covers the punky QB known as McMahon:

Every fan has a favorite game. Mine was played on Sept. 19, 1985, in the third week of the season, the Bears versus the Vikings in the Metrodome, which Mike Ditka, to the annoyance of Minnesotans, referred to as the Roller Dome. The Bears had defeated New England without incident the week before, but Mac had ended up in Lake Forest Hospital, where he spent two days in traction. Fans serious enough to read injury reports would have assumed Number 9 wrenched himself while executing like a daredevil.

No one played like Jim McMahon. Most quarterbacks avoid contact; McMahon actually sought it out. He loved hitting and getting hit. Ditka described him as a quarterback who thinks he’s a linebacker. At the end of scoring plays, he’d race downfield, 20 or 30 yards, in search of a lineman to head-butt. A football kiss. “No question that he shortened his career because of the way he played,” Ditka said. “He ran, dove, hung onto the ball too long. . . . He had no regard for his body. But I couldn’t change him. It would have ruined him.” Only later did we learn the truth: McMahon had not hurt his back in the game but while sleeping on a water bed. Years ago, when I went to a neurologist complaining of numb fingers—I thought I had a brain tumor—he told me that I was suffering from a condition known as park bench palsy, a name derived from hobos who passed out on benches with one arm hooked over the top. It’s also called honeymoon palsy, as it’s common among new husbands, who, not wanting to be rude, let their brides sleep all night on their outstretched arms. Mac had suffered water bed palsy: a win over the Patriots, a drunken debauch, a stumble upstairs, a swoon into the watery waste, followed by hours of dreamless sleep in the most awkward position.

He showed up at practice in a neck brace. It was the sort of monstrous thing you wear when trying to turn a fender-bender into a life-changing lawsuit. Ditka took one look at him and said, “You’re not playing.” This was Tuesday, and the game was scheduled for prime time Thursday. McMahon did not accept Ditka’s decision. Asked about the game, he smirked and said, “There’s no possibility I’m not playing.”

“The one problem [McMahon] had was with authority,” Ditka wrote. “He had a problem with his father, he had a problem with his Brigham Young coach, and he had a problem with me. Authority figures. He was defiant just because he didn’t want to be known as a conformist, or a guy who would listen. He sure as hell didn’t care about being the All-American boy.”

Mac showed up at his next practice in street clothes and sat in the bleachers with Joe Namath, who was interviewing the Bears quarterback for ABC. McMahon would not miss a chance to hang out with Namath. This was Mac’s spirit guide. “I never was a hero-worshiper, or jock-sniffer, or autograph seeker,” McMahon wrote in his autobiography, McMahon! The Bare Truth About the Brashest Bear. “I liked Mickey Mantle, I think Jack Nicholson is super [but] if there’s one person I identify with in sports it’s Namath.”

At the end of practice, when the press asked if McMahon would play, Ditka was more emphatic than ever: Did you see him up there? No f——way. He then cited a rule in the manner of a judge citing legal precedent: “If you don’t practice, you don’t play.”

“That’s a high school rule,” said McMahon. “There’s no possibility I won’t play.”

Most of us believed the Ditka/McMahon feud was phony, ginned up for the press in the way of a subplot in professional wrestling. But when I floated this theory to Steve Zucker, then McMahon’s agent, he said, “I was the go-between. I put the fires out. Believe me. It was real. They wouldn’t talk to each other for weeks. But it was like father and son. They wouldn’t talk but they loved each other. Sort of. In a way. They respected each other. They were both very stubborn men.” …

The ABC cameras found McMahon on the sideline, and, having found him, seemed reluctant to pull away. Mac was a star—he had that on even his worst days. Frank Gifford of ABC said there was no chance McMahon would play. Ditka had characterized his role as “Catastrophe Quarterback.” Namath wasn’t so sure. Boy, I don’t know, Frank. Jim told me there’s no chance he won’t play.

The game started, then dragged. It got boring. The defense did what the defense did, but Steve Fuller, who started at QB for the Bears, could not produce. It was three and out, three and out. Most drives ended in a punt. The Bears defense began to lose faith. You could see it in the way they jogged onto the field after yet another failed possession. In the third quarter, the Bears were losing 17–9. And there seemed no prospect of putting up more points.

Meanwhile, McMahon was following Ditka up and down the sideline, talking, yelling, demanding: Put me in! Put me in!! Ditka ignored him the way a big dog ignores yapping little dog until the yapping becomes intolerable, at which point he’d respond with a few ominous big dog barks: No I won’t put you in! Do you know why? Because if you don’t practice, you don’t play! This feud was more exciting than anything happening on the field; it was a high school soap opera, the coach driven mad by the flaky quarterback.

By the middle of the quarter, McMahon had his helmet on and was playing catch on the sideline. Frank Gifford said McMahon was warming up on his own: Ditka won’t let him play. You felt just how badly Ditka wanted to win without McMahon. He hated how talent seemed to give the quarterback permission to do whatever he wanted. In the last minutes of the third quarter, Minnesota took on the air of a team mopping up. It was all over. “The offense was sputtering, doing nothing,” Ditka said. “I could see that Walter was not himself. And all of the time, as we were falling behind, McMahon was bugging the s—out of me. He was pouting down on the bench, then he was standing behind me, then he was following me around like a puppy. I turned around and almost stepped on top of him. ‘Put me in,’ he was saying, ‘I can play. I’m fine.’ ”

Ditka finally threw up his hands and said, “All right, just go.”

McMahon fastened his chin strap and ran into the game. From that moment, he would always be conflated in my mind with Shane, the reluctant gunfighter forced back into the fight, the man who, by his presence alone, changes everything. As soon as he got onto the turf, you could feel a change in the weather. “Jim rolled in like a gunfighter strutting into Dodge City,” Singletary wrote in his autobiography, Calling the Shots. “You could see the whole offense pick up.” The running backs, the linemen, the receivers—they lifted their shoulders, their chests filled with air. Believing you’re in it, that you have a chance—it makes all the difference. “Every good starting quarterback has got that confident arrogance—I’m better than everybody else,’” defensive tackle Steve McMichael wrote in his book Tales From the Chicago Bears Sideline. “When I talk about the difference between Jim McMahon and Steve Fuller, I’m not talking about athletic ability, I’m talking about presence—the kind of person who everybody knows is around. It’s like when you’re at the high school dance and the most popular girl walks in the gym, all eyes turn to her.” McMahon took a knee in the huddle, grinned, and said, “All right, boys, we’re going down that field and getting six.”

For McMahon, these few moments at the center of the world, at the still point of the spinning globe, made the rest of it—early mornings, practices, Ditka’s tantrums—tolerable. Not being sure about McMahon’s physical condition, Ditka sent him in with a conservative play: a screen pass. But when the quarterback got to the line, he noticed something. Having noticed something, he called an audible. That is, he changed the play. Ditka, on the sideline, having been turned into a spectator, cursed, threw his clipboard. McMahon stumbled as he took the snap and came very close to falling down. Later speculation attributed this stumble variously to his back, to being rusty, to the drugs that lit him like a Christmas tree, even to the aftereffects of a long night of partying. “I don’t know if I should tell this on him,” McMichael wrote, “And I don’t want [to say] anything negative about the boys in this book, but he wasn’t supposed to play, remember. So yeah, he’d been out all night. Smelled like alcohol, you know?”

McMahon righted himself, then set up in the pocket. A Vikings tackle got through and was heading for Number 9 with all the steam of a free runner. He would have ended the play, maybe the game, but, at the last moment, Payton, freelancing his way into the action, took the rusher out. This incredible block—Sweetness launching himself into the knees of a man twice his size—shows what made Payton one of the best backs in football history.

Payton had given McMahon an extra moment and he used it to find Willie Gault deep downfield. A screamer, a high flyer. Gault snagged it on the run. Just like that, Shane had picked off the first of the bad men, the leather-clad phantom hiding in the shadows on the balcony. One play, 70 yards, touchdown.

When McMahon got to the sideline, Ditka grabbed him, got in his face, and said,

“Tell me, what f—– play did I call?”

“Screen pass.”

“Then why the f— did you do that?”

“ ’Cause Willie was open.”

It was not just the offense that McMahon brought to life; it was the defense too. “I’ve never been around another quarterback that had that kind of effect,” safety Doug Plank told me. “He made everybody better, not just the receivers and tight ends, but the linebackers and safeties. He’d be head-butting the guys as they went onto the field.”

On the Vikings’ next possession, Wilber Marshall picked off a pass. A minute later, Mac was back on the field. Ditka sent in a running play. Mac saw something. He called an audible. Ditka kicked over a cooler. Mac rolled left, then hit receiver Dennis McKinnon in the chest as he crossed into the end zone. Two plays, two touchdowns. Bears 23, Vikings 17.

The Vikings came apart after that, took penalties, made mistakes. Is there a moment in the movie when some of the actors realize they’ve been cast as the bad guys? McMahon threw a perfect strike to Gault his next time on the field, but Gault dropped it. That was the rap on Gault: soft, he gave up the ball at the hint of contact. McMahon ran for a first down. “Gutsy little man, isn’t he?” said Gifford. “Pinched nerve and all.” A few plays later, McMahon found McKinnon in the end zone. He later described the audible that led to that score as “another sandlot maneuver.” If I had known then what I know now, I’d have quit watching sports that day. It was never going to get better.

I snapped a mental picture of McMahon in the fourth. He was watching from the sideline as the final seconds drained off the clock on one of the great performances: seven passes, three touchdowns, 166 yards—in seven minutes. He’d taken off his helmet and fortified himself with another plug of chew. His hair was pushed back and he looked tough, with a three-day growth of beard. You could tell that he was admired, loved and admired, the sort of guy who would dominate even those nights when he was not around; everyone would laugh when his name was invoked, smile and say, “McMahon, that crazy f—–. . . .”

[Tight end] Tim Wrightman: “Physically he doesn’t look like an athlete. He’s soft, pasty. He looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy. He couldn’t throw a spiral. Believe me, I caught lots of his passes. They never looked right. But he could read the defenses and he always found a way. He would switch the ball into his left hand on the goal line as he was getting tackled and throw it left-handed for a touchdown. He was just win at all costs. And he was smart. The guy could read defenses, and, most importantly, he was the only quarterback that could get along with Ditka.”

Ditka tried to revamp the Bears’ offense when he took over. “He came in with a scheme that was finally something other than Payton left, Payton right, Payton on the screen pass,” Moorehead told me. “That had been going on since Walter arrived. There was no diversity, no motions, everybody knew what was going to happen. It was pretty pathetic.” Ditka added deep routes and trick plays, but the offense remained woefully conservative. “It was boring,” McMahon said. “We ran the ball, not what I was used to. There wasn’t a whole lot to be successful with at quarterback for the Bears. There was nothing to do. You get to throw on third and long. If you’re lucky enough to get a first down, you keep playing. It was frustrating.”

Mac changed that: He would run Ditka’s plays only until he recognized a mismatch or a flaw in the defense, at which point he called a audible. This gave Ditka fits, but it finally made the Bears dangerous. But McMahon’s greatest contribution was leadership. Even on bad days, the team played better when he was on the field. With Number 9 in the game, they always believed they could win. “It was his personality, the fact that he’d fight,” Plank told me. “If we needed a yard, he’d go head-first. If it meant jumping off the ledge, he was going to jump off a ledge. I think the defenders looked at him and said, ‘Wow, we wish he was on our side.’ He was just one of those guys.”

“He played with total abandon and he’s not big,” said safety Gary Fencik. “He took a beating.”

“Everybody rallied around him because he was willing to do whatever it took,” said Moorehead. “Even though he only weighed 190 pounds, he was just as physical as our linemen. He would deny the plays Ditka sent in, be like, ‘Nah, that ain’t gonna work.’ Then call a play of his own. And of course everybody really wanted to make that play work. Nine times out of ten, McMahon made the right call.”

“Jim knew what he was doing,” Ditka told me. “A lot of guys with audibles didn’t. If you knew the game and studied the game, it didn’t bother me if you wanted to change something. Nobody said the play I called was the best in the world. But I called it based on what I’d seen on film and everything.”

The Bears won Super Bowl XX, and then Ryan left to become the coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles didn’t get to the Super Bowl under Ryan. Ditka, meanwhile, left, or was pushed out of, his Bears job and eventually became coach of the New Orleans Saints. That didn’t start or end well for Ditka. Ryan went from Philadelphia to Arizona, and that also neither started nor ended well.

The Packers, of course, continued their Gory Years ineptitude into the 1990s before Ron Wolf and Mike Holmgren arrived. (McMahon ended his career with the Super Bowl XXXI Packers, as Brett Favre’s backup.) With a couple of hiccup seasons, the Packers have generally been one of the best NFL teams since then. Da Bears? Not so much. Some blame the McCaskey family, owners of the team; others blame the previous general manager, Jerry Angelo, and coach, Lovie Smith. The Packers may be the NFL’s model franchise. No one says that about the Bears.

Ditka was talking about the 1963 Bears, which won the NFL title with Ditka at tight end, but he could have been talking about the 1985 Bears, with Ditka as coach:

“Why didn’t you repeat?”

“What’s that?”

“Why didn’t your championship team repeat?”

This was me talking to Ditka over dinner one night. He sat back in his chair; his eyes glittering as he said, “Well, you see, right there, you’ve put your finger on the big question. Why’s it so hard for a team that’s won to win again? Maybe winning is the greatest thing that can happen to a team and also the biggest disaster. It’s never the same after you win.”

About this time 21 years ago, the Packers hosted the Cincinnati Bengals (ironically, Sunday’s opponent) at Lambeau Field in their third game of the 1992 season.

Almost three hours later, the Packers looked to be 0–3, losing to Cincinnati 23–17 and having lost their starting quarterback, Don Majkowski, to injury.

Which placed the Packers’ offense in the hands of a second-round draft pick the Packers traded a first-round draft pick to acquire:

And then …

As the Milwaukee Journal’s Bob McGinn wrote:

The Packers lost quarterback Don Majkowski for one to four weeks with ligament damage to his left ankle on their sixth play from scrimmage, they lost three of their seven fumbles and kicker Chris Jacke missed field-goal attempts of 32 and 47 yards.

Then with 1 minute 7 seconds remaining rookie Robert Brooks fielded a kickoff one step from the sideline rather then let it carom out of bounds. Instead of starting from the 35, Brooks’ gaffe left the Packers at their eight and trailing by six points without a timeout left.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to have been in their situation,” Bengals coach Dave Shula said.

On first down, there was a smattering of boos when fullback Harry Sydney gained four yards on a swing pass before stepping out. But as meaningless as the play was, it had served an important purpose.

Now Holmgren could see what Lynn would do on defense. The Bengals (2-1) would rush only their front four players on the last five snaps, dropping a second tier of five players into zone coverage across the field. That left safeties Fernandus Vinson and Darryl Williams in the third tier, each with responsibility for covering half of the field from the middle to their sideline.

It’s a simple coverage, often referred to as “Cover 2” in the National Football League.

The vulnerable sector of the defense is the deep outside, where the cornerback is instructed to bump the wide receiver at the line and then, if the receiver runs up the sideline, to stay with him as far as possible until the safety is able to sprint over and break up the pass.

Some quarterbacks don’t have enough arm strength to gun the ball on a line beyond the drifting cornerback and before the safety gets over. Favre not only did it once, he did it twice in truly heroic fashion.

His first bull’s-eye came on the second play and covered 42 yards to Sterling Sharpe in front of the Bengals’ coaching staff. The ball was thrown high and hard, but Sharpe adjusted his body and made an awkward but tremendous reception. When Sharpe sprawled to the grass at the Cincinnati 46, he suffered what Holmgren later described as separated ribs, an injury that he didn’t regard as particularly serious.

Vinson, a seventh-round draft choice from North Carolina State in 1991, was almost 10 yards from Sharpe when the ball arrived. He is a big hitter who runs 40 yards in 4.7 seconds, slow for a safety and considerably slower than Rickey Dixon, the starting free safety who was just coming off a long holdout and was withheld from the lineup.

“I played against Brett in a bowl game in Birmingham, Alabama and the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama,” Vinson said, referring first to the All-American Bowl. “He keeps throwing it and he keeps throwing it hard.”

The third play, a circle pass to Vince Workman out of the backfield gained 11 yards to the 35. By the time Favre reassembled the team and threw into the ground to stop the clock, just 19 seconds remained. Appearing to be in pain, Sharpe left and was replaced by Kitrick Taylor, a Plan B refugee from San Diego who hadn’t scored a touchdown in his six-year pro career.

Taylor was joined on the right side for the fifth play by Jackie Harris who was lined up tight. Brooks and Sanjay Beach were wide left. All four receivers went straight up the field putting the onus on the offensive line to protect Favre on a seven-step drop.

Ken Ruettgers neutralized Alfred Williams, Rich Moran stopped Alonzo Mitz, Tootie Robbins tied up Danny Stubbs, Tim Krumrie bull rushed Ron Hallstrom back almost into Favre, but the quarterback still was able to step up and hurl the exact same pass he had just completed to Sharpe.

Rod Jones, the cornerback across from Taylor, inexplicably let Taylor release off the line without contact. Favre had time to pump fake to Harris down the middle, freezing Vinson just long enough so he was unable to interrupt the pass to the sideline.

Jones, who has good speed, again misread the perilous situation. By the time he turned to chase after Taylor, it was too late. Favre had unleashed a 40-yard-strike that hit Taylor in stride as he crossed into the end zone with 13 seconds remaining.

“If he had laid it up for a few more seconds, I could have got there,” Jones said. “But he didn’t.”

Said center James Campen: “I saw the whole thing. It was just like a missile.”

Terrell Buckley, whose 58-yard punt return for a touchdown with 12:43 left cut the Packers’ 17-3 deficit to 17-10, said he couldn’t believe how the Bengals had played in the secondary. Shula refused to second guess Lynn, and Favre chose not to speculate whether the Bengals’ vanilla defense suggested ignorance of his arm strength.

“They may have,” Favre said. “I doubt they’ll do it again”.

The completions to Sharpe and Taylor were longer than the longest gain by the Packers in any game under Holmgren.

“If you can pass protect in that situation you’ve got a chance to move the ball,” Holmgren said. “I’ve been fortunate to be associated with some great teams in San Fransisco, but this [victory] is obviously the happiest in my life.”

The Packers trailed, 20-10, midway in the fourth quarter, and had gained just 165 yards in their first 10 possessions. At that point, Favre had completed 13 of 28 passes for 130 yards, fumbled four times, was sacked five times and committed a multitude of mistakes.

“But the guys kept hanging with me,” Favre said. “They could have been saying ‘this sucker’s killing us, get him out of here.’”

Favre got them into the end zone in less than 4 minutes, covering 88 yards in eight plays. The Bengals ground out two first downs, then got the ball back again when Buckley fumbled away a punt at the Green Bay 35. Five consecutive rushes by Derrick Fenner produced one first down and Jim Breech’s 41-yard field goal, but with Favre on fire it was one point too little.

(Majkowski’s “one to four weeks” turned out to be “one to forever,” as a coworker put it this morning.)

Go back and watch (at 4:10) the extra point. Notice who the holder is. Notice that the holder isn’t holding the ball when Packer kicker Chris Jacke kicks the game-winning extra point.

The next week, the Packers found a new holder.

After an exciting (and well-viewed) but disappointing opener at San Francisco, the Packers’ home opener is Sunday, meaning the debut of the south end zone renovations.

I’m old enough to remember when Lambeau Field was one of the smaller NFL stadiums. Now, at 80,750, Lambeau Field is, depending on how you measure it, the third- or fourth-largest stadium in the NFL. FedEx Field — where Sunday’s opponent, Washington, plays, in Landover, Md. — is the biggest in terms of seats, at 85,000, but AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, where the Packers went for Super Bowl XLV and where they go Dec. 15, can be expanded via standing room to 105,121. (Super Bowl XLV’s attendance was 103,219.)

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

If you are lucky enough to be one of the 7,000 Packers fans — or their surrounding neighbors — in the newly renovated south end zone of Lambeau Field this season, you might want to invest in a couple of other things.

Like sign-language lessons. Or lip-reading training. Definitely aspirin.

When the Green Bay Packers play the Washington Redskins on Sunday in the home opener, they will get their first look at a fully enclosed stadium crowd of 80,000-plus fans.

But more than anything, they hope to hear it.

“I would say if it can get loud, like we know it can? That can be huge for us,” said tight end Jermichael Finley. “I’m excited about that.”

Home-field advantage is no myth in the NFL and the Packers are hoping to make every voice count in the new Lambeau Field.

The new monolithic end zone wall with its 7,000 new seats and huge scoreboard reaches higher than anwhere else at Lambeau Field, where once the south end zone was open above the lower bowl.

The height of the place adds to the noise because there’s nowhere for sound to escape.

“The joke is, you gotta wear a seat belt,” said usher Nathan Amtmann, way up in section 742. He attended many games before he was hired this summer but they were in the regular bowl of Lambeau. He noticed after one scrimmage and two preseason games that Lambeau already had a new kind of roar.

The south end zone already has picked up a few nicknames: The Wall, the Wall of Sound, The SEZ, Mount Murphy (by WTMJ Radio’s Doug Russell in honor of team president Mark Murphy) and Lambeau Peak among them.

The renovation of the end zone brings added noise potential for a number of reasons. There are 5,400 additional seats in the just the “wings” of the end zone, the sections not directly beneath the jumbotron. The noise from the extra occupants is also projected back on the field with little overhangs. …

“Oh yeah,” said Packers defensive end C.J. Wilson. “Home-field advantage is great, but the louder it is? Talk to any offensive guy. It makes it that more difficult. As the defense, we draw off of that energy. I could see it helping a lot.”

The Packers do plan to measure decibel levels with a noise meter for games and the towel-waving defense will not be shy to ask for more.

“Heck yeah, we were noticing it in the preseason,” said defensive lineman Ryan Pickett. “It was that much louder. It is awesome. I love it. We noticed it Family Night. It’s just louder in the stadium. We loved it, especially as a defense.”

Added cornerback Tramon Williams: “Anytime you’re getting a lot of energy from the fans, you want to feed off of it.”

The Packers admired the crowd noise in Seattle last year at CentryLink Field. And everyone knows what they have up there in Minnesota, where the crowd noise is such a factor for the Packers that they prepare for it in practice by pumping in simulated cheering sounds. The Packers want to have their own cranium rattler. They want to be third row at the rock stage at Summerfest loud.

Let’s hope it works. After going the equivalent of three full seasons without losing a home game in the 1990s, the Packers have not been as dominant at home as they should be since years began in 2.

But perhaps the Packers shouldn’t be blamed for this. The Packers themselves point out that the Packers’ 26–2 home record since Week 10 of the 2009 season is best in the entire league, ahead of New England, which seems to never lose at home. That does not include the traveshamockery of losing the 2011 NFC divisional playoff to the (eventual Super Bowl XLVI champion) New York Giants, but number one is number one. Since 2010, Green Bay has more home (again, regular-season) wins than any other team.

It seems as if home field advantage means less than it used to, particularly in the playoffs. The 2010 Packers, who won three consecutive road playoff games on the way to winning Super Bowl XLV, can attest to that. Baltimore won two road playoff games on the way to winning Super Bowl XLVII, beating San Francisco, which won the NFC Championship at Atlanta.

Independent of the fact that both the Packers and Redskins lost their openers, and as Packers announcer Wayne Larrivee is fond of repeating no team wants to start 0–2, the Packers and Redskins have a long history against each other. They met twice in the playoffs, with the Packers winning their first NFL championship game over the Boston-on-the-way-to-Washington Redskins in 1936 (the Packers’ first three titles were by having the best record in the NFL), and the Redskins winning in the 1972 NFC playoffs.

In 1983, the Packers and Redskins played a game on the short list of the greatest Monday Night Football games of all time. Packers 48, Redskins 47, the highest scoring game in Monday Night Football history and the highest scoring game in Packer history. (More points than Dodgeville 48, Platteville 45, a game I announced two weeks ago that was the length of a Super Bowl, but fewer points than Ripon 56, Oconto 42 in 2003.)

On the Redskins side was a defensive back named Mark Murphy, now president of the Packers. (Not to be confused with the other defensive back Mark Murphy, who played for the Packers around the same time. The difference is Packers president Murphy has hair; the other Murphy has alopecia.)

In the Packers’ 1980 season opener against Chicago, Packers kicker Chester Marcol scored all 12 Packer points — two field goals and …

A site called WhooNew claims to have identified 10 different types of Packer fans, including …

1. The Tough Guy

These are the fans who like to call themselves “die-hards.” They prove their love of the Green Bay Packers by self-inflicting pain upon themselves.

Most often, that pain comes from extremely cold temperatures that no human should have to endure. These guys (and girls) don’t just go to a game even if the wind chill is 40-below. They make sure to tailgate all day ahead of time.

By halftime, they are so numb that they start stripping down. According to the Mayo Clinic, this is actually a sign of hypothermia. They will never leave the stadium early to try and beat the traffic. They’ll stay in the bleachers (never the skyboxes) until only other frozen Tough Guys are left standing gripping those little beanbag hand-warmers that ran out of heat hours ago. …

2. The Old-Timer

The Packers are one of the oldest teams in football history. So it makes sense that they also have a lot of geezers for fans. (Not you, Grandma)These are the old folks who constantly remind you that they were actually there at the Ice Bowl.

They proudly proclaim that they were once seduced by Paul Hornung, Vince Lombardi cut them off in traffic, they arm-wrestled Ray Nitschke and perhaps they even watched the Acme Packers play at the old City Stadium. …

3. The Oblivious Moron

The moron means well – but truth be told  – these fans simply don’t understand the game of football. They just want to get caught up in all the excitement like everyone else.

These fans are the ones who have to ask questions like”Why do they get two points for a safety?” or worse yet “Who has the ball right now?”

If they go to the game, they’re even more confused, because they don’t have Joe Buck and Troy Aikman to help explain things. So their favorite part ends up being the chance to guess the attendance at Lambeau Field. …

4. The Selfish Fantasy Freak

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the fan who is obsessed with stats and history. Chances are…this number-cruncher has at least four fantasy football teams.

Fantasy football is great. But the one problem is that it makes you focus on players’ performances instead of your favorite team.

These types of fans often deal with an intense internal conflict because of the desire to prove they know everything about the NFL and could actually be the GM of a real team.

The fantasy freak may quietly cheer to himself when Adrian Peterson runs for 80 yards against the Packers. Or he may yell in disgust with the rest of us, before exclaiming “Well, at least he’s on my fantasy team.” …

5. The Bandwagon Jumper

Any team that has success will also have bandwagon fans. But the Green Bay Packers are unique, because they are one of the few franchises to pick up bandwagon fans even when they’re having a terrible year.

That’s simply because the passion and excitement portrayed by the real fans is so contagious.

Bandwagon jumpers could be people who moved to the area from out of state, or people who married into a family of Packer-Backers. They had no choice but to assimilate when their father-in-law gave them a cheesehead for Christmas.

They’ll often keep their allegiance to their home-state teams in other sports. So you’ll get St. Louis Cardinal/Packers fans or Detroit Redwing/Packers fans. …

6. The Eternal Pessimist

We all know fans who predict the Packers will be in the Super Bowl every single year. But for every prediction of 14-2 there is a fan of the Green & Gold who is certain they’ll be lucky to go 8-8.

They complain about the team more than they complain about the Wisconsin weather (and we all complain about that a lot).

If there’s a player that’s having a bad year, the Eternal Pessimist shows no mercy. “Bench him! Cut him! Tar and feather him and run him out of town on a rail!” They question every coaching decision, every draft pick, every play.

If the team goes for it on 4th down – they should have punted. If the punter comes out – they would have gone for it.

Don’t be fooled – these fans love the Packers. It’s just a tough love. …

7. The Cry Baby

Some fans get just a little bit too emotional when they watch the Packers.

If you’ve ever been brought to tears by a regular season loss, this might be you (playoff loss crying is acceptable).

The Cry Baby fan doesn’t only experience exaggerated emotions when the Packers lose. They feel like the world is going to end whenever Aaron Rodgers gets sacked. They stress out when the team loses yardage on 2nd and 3. But they also celebrate a lot harder than the rest of us.

If you’ve never seen two grown men hugging each other with tears of joy streaming down their faces, you’ve never watched the Packers win on a last-minute drive with a couple of Cry Babies. …

8. The Angry A-hole

This fan seems capable of expressing only one emotion. And that emotion is pissed-the-hell-off!

It works out – because there is always something to be angry about in football. You can be furious at the Packers poor performance, or at the coaching staff. You can be ticked off at the referees, or because you think Chris Collinsworth “hates us for no good reason.”

They are a close cousin to the Eternal Pessimist. However, these guys tend to have high hopes, which get smashed into a million pieces no matter what. …

Comments added other types (Internet smilies theirs):

Sports Illustrated’s new Monday Morning Quarterback site assigned former Packer vice president Andrew Brandt to write about the world’s most unique stockholder meeting:

With profits at an alltime high, thousands of “owners” (fans who hold Packers’ stock certificates) will gather in an 80,000-seat boardroom (Lambeau Field) to hear about the state of the franchise (excellent, if you’ve gotten over last January’s playoff loss). During my time as the Packers vice president, I presented several of these reports breaking down the cap situation to the friendliest group of shareholders you’ll ever find. …

Former general manager Ron Wolf was always quite revealing when describing the team’s strengths and weaknesses. He played to the crowd, saving the quarterback position for last and being sure to describe Brett Favre as “the finest quarterback in the National Football League” to wild applause. The most common question that I received from fans at the annual meeting was, “Is Aaron Rodgers really going to be the guy who takes over when Brett retires?” I always said yes, yet few believed me. Most thought we would pursue a veteran quarterback. Current GM Ted Thompson is far less expansive in his comments, using bland descriptions of players like, “He’s a fine young man and we think he’ll play well for us this year.” Nevertheless, Thompson will draw steady applause.

Following the general manager’s report, the crowd thins. Subsequent reports on finance, marketing, investments, and community relations are important, but the majority of people want to hear about football, not business. And hey, the Packer Pro Shop and Curly’s Restaurant beckon! In recent years the Packers have given shareholders a free tour of Lambeau. It was important to add value, especially to those traveling long distances to attend the meeting, which now occurs before camp opens instead of at the end.

The shareholders’ meeting always reaffirmed my belief that the Packers are much more than a football team. They’re a community, a way of life. Many consider their Packers stock, which isn’t transferable and has no dividend potential, to be one of their most valuable possessions. When managing the Packers’ payroll and contracts, I often thought about what was in the best interest of shareholders. I viewed myself as a steward of a public trust. The closest approximation the Packers have to an owner is the Executive Committee, which deals with only off-field matters. The football operations staff is given complete autonomy in managing the team and player finances. …

Just last week, the rosiest report in franchise history came out: the Packers had a record profit of $54.3 million on revenues of $308 million. The profit represents a 26% increase from last year’s then-record of $43 million. Murphy, however, will try to tamp down the report and point to the cyclical nature of contract negotiations skewing the numbers—this offseason’s lucrative extensions for Rodgers and Clay Matthews will not be reflected until the next year’s report. No matter, this year still illustrates the huge uptick in financial performance for NFL teams since the 2011 CBA. Speaking of which…

Although the Players Association has long implored NFL teams to “show us your books,” the Packers financial statement is the league’s only one available for viewing. Which increases scrutiny on Green Bay from an array of observers. I remember giving a presentation at Stanford during the NFL’s career symposium and being peppered with questions about the report. I begged off, saying I didn’t have the documents in front of me. Upon saying that, the entire audience pointed to the screen behind me, where our revenue and expense chart was being displayed on a PowerPoint!

On a macro level, the Packers’ financials have always been an interesting subject when it comes to collective bargaining. Just like his predecessor, the late Gene Upshaw, NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith argues that such a healthy profit—in the league’s tiniest market, no less—is compelling evidence that all teams should be sharing more money with players. I remember having many conversations with Upshaw over lunch during his annual visit to Green Bay. He would look out my office window, down at the Lambeau Field Atrium where tour groups and restaurants hummed along, and say wistfully, “We need to get some of that money.”

I would always remind him that while the Packers are one of the great success stories in all of sport, its unique brand doesn’t compare to anything else in the NFL. More more than 100,000 people are on the season-ticket waiting list, more than a million have toured Lambeau, and practice squad players routinely get recognized on the street. He knew all this, of course, but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to argue his case. And to be sure, there is a key number in the Packers’ report that shows a glimpse into all teams’ financials. It’s the national revenue from the league, largely from broadcast deals, of $180 million. The import of that number is this: every team should be able to cover its player payroll from national revenue alone, allowing other income to be used elsewhere. Because there is no true owner taking the money for his/her own personal benefit, the Packers’ profit goes toward renovations and is put into a reserve fund that now exceeds $250 million. For a franchise with no stadium debt, this represents quite a healthy balance sheet.

Lombardi Avenue, meanwhile, shows off the Lambeau Field renovations for those shareholders who couldn’t get to the meeting:

The Packers reportedly claimed Wednesday that the top of the new south end zone is now the highest point in Brown County. That is entirely appropriate.

NFL.com surveys the management structures of the NFC North teams, including, of course, the Packers:

Owner: N/A
General Manager: Ted Thompson, 9th Year
Head Coach: Mike McCarthy, 8th Year
Other front-office notables: Mark Murphy, President and CEO; Russ Ball, Vice President of Football Administration; Eliot Wolf, Director of Pro Personnel; Brian Gutekunst, Director of College Scouting; Alonzo Highsmith, Senior Personnel Executive.

Who’s really in charge? Ted Thompson’s say-so in Green Bay is about as strong as any GM’s influence in the league. The Packers tried a coach-driven model after Thompson’s mentor, Ron Wolf, retired — giving the keys to Mike Sherman. Thompson left Green Bay to serve as the Seattle Seahawks‘ vice president of football operations for five years. But in 2005, the Packers brought back Thompson with the title of general manager and returned to the method they implemented through the 1990s. Thompson hired head coach Mike McCarthy in his second year on the job. McCarthy reports to Thompson, who reports to Mark Murphy. And Murphy is overseen by the board of directors for the publicly held club.

The Packers are considered a model NFL franchise, but they didn’t get there without some luck. The drafting of Aaron Rodgers, for instance, only occurred after Thompson’s attempts to trade down failed, leaving the club to take the highest-rated player on its board at a position that wasn’t of immediate need. But the system has been good in Green Bay, largely because those in charge of different departments are experts in those areas and are able to put egos aside.

Thompson can be a demanding boss. Standards are high and don’t bend much. But it has worked. Great success has led other clubs to raid Green Bay; Joe Philbin was hired away from McCarthy’s staff, and John Schneider, Reggie McKenzie and John Dorsey were poached from Thompson’s crew. Guys like Eliot Wolf, Alonzo Highsmith and Brian Gutekunst have been relied upon to step up. Russ Ball, who’s garnered some interest as another GM candidate, has become a right-hand man to Thompson in handling the contractual side. Suffice it to say, many teams envy how smoothly things run in Green Bay.

An outside perspective from an NFC general manager: “It’s all football, all the time there. The majority of the revenue goes right back into the team. There isn’t an owner saying, ‘OK, this year, if we make $7 million, I make $4 million, and $3 million goes back into it.’ It all goes right back into the organization, into improving the team, into hiring coaches, or, on the business side, investing in the building itself. There’s no owner, but there’s a successful group of businessmen that the president and GM have to sit with, and talk about their direction. The only way it goes bad is if the committee feels like they have a lot of juice in football decisions. But normally, they’re just a great resource in how they grow the business, and also to keep a gauge on Ted and Mark and Mike and whether they’re doing a good enough job.”

As an owner who knows some Executive Committee members, it seems obvious to me that the Packers are run the right way in every visible way. The Executive Committee represents much of the best of Wisconsin’s business acumen, so for Murphy to not listen to them would be stupid. And the Packers do not make stupid moves.

Murphy’s predecessor, Bob Harlan, was not a football guy, and wasn’t hired to be a football guy. His job was to hire the football guys and let them do their work until Harlan determined they weren’t working out. (Harlan fired Wolf’s predecessor, Tom Braatz, and signed off on Sherman’s hire as coach, promotion to general manager, demotion from general manager, and firing as coach.) Harlan’s more important role was to shore up the Packers’ business end, because the Packers were not necessarily a model franchise from the business end. The results are obvious, and things have not slipped on the business end under Murphy.