I’m still not sure how the Packers managed to beat Dallas 26–21 in their NFC Divisional playoff game Sunday.

I guess the Packers won because, despite the Cowboys’ seeming dominance of the game, the Packers were opportunistic. A missed field goal led to a Packers field goal to cut the halftime deficit to 14–10. A fumble by running back DeMarco Murray led to another field goal to cut the lead to 21–16. The Packers got the game-winning score late in the fourth quarter when they unveiled their no-running-back offense and drove 80 yards through the previously stiff Cowboys defense.

After that, well …

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… here’s the Dallas Morning News’ Tim Cowlishaw:

It looked like a catch. That was true for innocent bystanders and neutral observers and it was painfully true for Dallas fans.

But the Cowboys are the team without a leg to stand on when it comes to sympathy for overturned officials’ calls. And yet it appeared Dez Bryant had gotten one, two, maybe three legs down to put Dallas in position to knock off the Packers right here in Lambeau Field, the site of the Cowboys’ most painful playoff defeat.

Then it was ripped away and, before you knew it, Green Bay was celebrating a 26-21 victory and a date with Seattle.

“I did think it was a catch,” Head Coach Jason Garrett said. “He had three feet down and made a move common to the game. But let me make it really clear. This game wasn’t about officiating. We had 60 minutes…and we didn’t do the things necessary to win the game.”

A week ago Lions fans and Cowboys haters couldn’t believe their eyes and ears when a pass interference flag was picked up, helping to fuel Dallas’ 24-20 rally past Detroit.

This time it was a catch Bryant made inside the one-yard line, a deep throw on fourth-and-two from the Green Bay 32, another roll of the dice from the Cowboys’ ramblin’ gamblin’ head coach. Less than five minutes to play, Packers leading 26-21, it looked like the Cowboys’ playmaking receiver had put Dallas in position to regain the lead it held for most of a cold but windless afternoon here.

In fact, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said he was unaware the Packers had even challenged the call.

“I thought they were trying to decide where to mark the ball,” Jones said. “It hadn’t even occurred to me we wouldn’t have possession within a yard of the goal line.”

But, like Garrett, he stopped far short of blaming officials for the end of the Cowboys’ best season in five years.

“We’ve all agreed to go with the judgment of the officials in this league,” he said. “I don’t mean to be cavalier about it, but this isn’t a catch in the annals of NFL history. Just like it would have been a catch had it not been overturned, just like it wasn’t interference on 59 (Anthony Hitchens) last week, just like (Ndamukong) Suh played and wasn’t suspended.

“That’s real, and we’ve all said we would live with it.”

The rule might seem contradictory to other rules (the ground cannot cause a fumble, but the ground can cause an incomplete pass?), but that is the rule until the NFL changes the rule. As the previously best known victim of this rule, Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson, can attest:

Calvin Johnson ‏@cockycalvin

Difference between me and Dez? You’d never see me pout like a little baby

Packers 26, Cowboys 21: “A bad rule, ruled correctly.”
That’s how one longtime NFL operative referred to the call that changed the course of the season for Green Bay and Dallas at Lambeau Field. And when the play was adjudicated by referee Gene Steratore under the hood in Green Bay, connected to NFL vice president for officiating Dean Blandino in the officiating command center in New York, they made the call by the exact interpretation of the rule book. With just over four minutes left and Dallas trailing by five, the Cowboys made a strange call on fourth-and-two with the game on the line: a deep ball down the left sideline. Dez Bryant made a leaping catch over Packers cornerback Sam Shields. But as Bryant landed, the ball became momentarily dislodged. The initial ruling was a completed catch, gain of 31, ball down at the Packer one. Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy challenged the ruling on the field. After a long review, Steratore emerged from the hood and said the call was reversed; Bryant hadn’t completed the act of the catch. Bryant put his hands to his head and, wide-eyed, looked to be saying, “WHAT?! WHAT!”

America said the same thing. It looked like a catch. By my Twitter feed, a good 80 percent of the fans who opined considered it a catch.

For Steratore, this had to be an agonizing case of déjà vu. He’s the referee who ruled on a similar replay in 2010, overturning a potential winning touchdown catch by Calvin Johnson in Chicago. On that play, Johnson rolled over in the end zone, using the ball to try to spring up, and the ball skittered away. Steratore ruled that Johnson didn’t complete the process of the catch, and the league backed him on it.

The vital and controversial part of this rule is that as a player falls to the ground in the continuation of the act of trying to make a catch, he has to maintain control of the ball when he hits the ground.

Here, Bryant leaped high in the air, had the ball in his control, took a couple quick steps and fell to the ground. Bryant said later he was attempting to stretch the ball across the goal line as he fell. That is a questionable claim. I’ve looked at the replay from different angles at least 25 times, and there’s no clear evidence Bryant was trying to reach across the goal line.

Bryant failed to maintain possession of the ball when he hit the ground. The ball popped from his grasp when his body hit the turf, and it momentarily left his grip. He caught it while on the ground without the ball hitting the ground. But by rule, that’s not important. Bryant would have had to possess the ball without it leaving his grasp when he hit the ground.

Crucial point two: If Steratore and Blandino had ruled that Bryant fumbled the ball while making a football act “common to the game,” they could have ruled the catch good and the ball down at the one. For instance, if they ruled that he caught the ball and then extended both arms “while making a football act common to the game”—that is, while trying to extend the ball across the goal line, and with the ball never being lost from his grasp—it would have been a catch. By a very close interpretation, Steratore and Blandino ruled that Bryant lost control, and not while making a football act common to the game.

Talking to a pool reporter after the game, Steratore said: “Although the receiver is possessing the football, he must maintain possession of that football throughout the entire process of the catch. In our judgment, he maintained possession but continued to fall and never had another act common to the game. We deemed that by our judgment to be the full process of the catch, and at the time he lands and the ball hits the ground, it comes loose as it hits the ground, which would make that incomplete; although he re-possesses it, it does contact the ground when he reaches, so the repossession is irrelevant because it was ruled an incomplete pass when we had the ball hit the ground.”

To me, this is a classic case of: Hate the rule, don’t hate the ref. I agree that it looked like a catch, but by rule, it wasn’t. “That’s an incomplete pass by rule,” said FOX rules analyst Mike Pereira, who used to have Blandino’s job. “The rule is very specific. In the process of going to the ground, you must maintain possession. That’s what happened here. The ball hit the ground and popped out immediately.” Two other former officials—Mike Carey on CBS and Jim Daopolous on ESPN—were similarly decisive.

“I want to know why it wasn’t a catch,” Bryant asked one wave of reporters. And then another: “Why? Explain why that wasn’t a catch.”

I just did, but Bryant may get some satisfaction this offseason because the rule is going to be debated. Again. For years, I’ve gone to league meetings and listened to debates about the rule. (Actually, the debates are fierce in the 24 or 48 hours after egregious plays; by the time the March meetings roll around, there are often long discussions but little passion about it. That could change this year, with the intensity of interest around this call.) One league source told me Sunday night that the Competition Committee will certainly look at the rule this offseason, beginning (likely) at the group‘s first meeting in February.

Maybe there will be enough momentum for a revolutionary change—for a catch to be catch as soon as a receiver gets two feet down and possesses the ball clearly. The problem with that in the past, as another source said Sunday, is “the cheap fumble.” Think of what happens when a pass, a catch by a receiver, a thudding hit by a defender and a fumble all occur at lightning speed. Did the receiver actually have possession before getting whacked and losing control of the ball? I can recall Jeff Fisher and Rich McKay, the Competition Committee co-chairs, explaining the debate over the rule at one recent meeting and saying, basically, We all agree we don’t love this current rule. We just don’t have a better one. It’s not an easy problem to solve.

With the anger over this call, expect debate to center on either two feet down and possession constituting a catch (with the requisite likely rise in the “cheap fumble”), or a proposal that a receiver doesn’t have to maintain control when going to the ground after taking two steps.

This being a schadenfreude column, we must include memes:

Not only is it ironic that the Cowboys benefited from an official’s call one week and then didn’t the next, the Packers are now going to Seattle, home of the infamous Interceptouchdown.

One great thing about the Packers’ standing in the NFL is the great journalism covering the Packers. Here are two examples.

If you go by the measurement of Super Bowl wins, then, in the same way that Bart Starr should be considered the greatest Packer quarterback of all time (five NFL titles and two Super Bowl wins), Joe Montana should be considered the greatest quarterback of the Super Bowl era.

As it happens, Packer coach Mike McCarthy had Montana as one of his quarterbacks when he was the Chiefs’ quarterback coach, as Grantland points out:

McCarthy had gone to K.C. to work with his mentor Paul Hackett, the Chiefs’ new offensive coordinator and a former assistant for Bill Walsh’s San Francisco 49ers. While working together at the University of Pittsburgh, Hackett and McCarthy had installed a version of Walsh’s legendary West Coast offense, which had powered four Super Bowl titles in the 1980s. McCarthy became enamored of the system during those years with the Panthers, immersing himself in the offense that was taking over football. By the time he went to the Chiefs, McCarthy felt he was ready for any challenge.

Well, almost any challenge: Prior to the 1993 season, the Chiefs traded for Montana, the veteran quarterback with extensive West Coast offense experience and four Super Bowl titles, and the man Jerry Rice referred to as “God.” McCarthy told Milwaukee’s JournalSentinel that the gravity of the assignment didn’t register until he excitedly let some of his close friends know that he’d be coaching Montana, and one responded by asking, “What in the [expletive] are you going to teach Joe Montana?” It was a good question, and it led McCarthy to become as much Montana’s student as his teacher, soaking in all the knowledge he could from the future Hall of Famer.

More than 20 years later, on the brink of a divisional-round playoff game against the Dallas Cowboys, McCarthy again finds himself in a teacher-student partnership with an elite pupil: Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Though McCarthy is facing a similar challenge of figuring out how to help one of the game’s best quarterbacks get even better, his relationship with Rodgers is far more collaborative than his pairing with Montana ever was, allowing coach and quarterback to try to improve themselves, each other, and the very offense Walsh taught Montana so long ago. …

When the Packers fired Mike Sherman and hired McCarthy as head coach after Rodgers’s first season, it altered the direction of both McCarthy’s and Rodgers’s careers.

McCarthy was hardly a slam dunk hire, having coached relatively pedestrian offenses in New Orleans from 2000 to 2004, and having spent the 2005 season as offensive coordinator for the 49ers, a 4-12 team that finished a woeful 30th in the league in scoring and 32nd in total yards. But Packers general manager Ted Thompson brought in McCarthy hoping the coach’s deep knowledge of the West Coast offense and renowned touch with quarterbacks would tame Favre after a 29-interception season, while also developing Favre’s anointed replacement. Though Favre bounced back under McCarthy, throwing for 4,155 yards, 28 touchdowns, and only 15 interceptions in 2007 en route to the NFC title game, he began to threaten retirement, and by 2008 Thompson and the organization were ready to switch to Rodgers, convinced after witnessing his dramatic improvement that the QB had the makings of a future star.

Since his days as an assistant under Hackett at Pitt, McCarthy has run a “QB school” every offseason, where, away from the pressure of preparing for a weekly opponent, McCarthy can teach his quarterbacks the finer points of the position. In addition to extensive drill work, McCarthy often gives his quarterbacks lengthy written tests, once (according to the Sentinel) even asking his non-Montana quarterbacks in Kansas City to write an essay describing the Chiefs’ version of the West Coast offense “from a philosophical perspective.”

Rodgers has clearly benefited from McCarthy’s training. As good of a prospect as Rodgers was coming out of Cal, it’s striking how different he looks now: he’s more athletic, more natural, and has a stronger arm. While primary credit goes to the long hours Rodgers spends developing his craft on his own, McCarthy provided a structure for that process.

Specifically, when Rodgers arrived in the NFL, there was what McCarthy has labeled a “stiffness” to his game. Under McCarthy’s tutelage, that has since melted away to reveal the fluid, smooth quarterback we see today. Tedford, Rodgers’s college coach and a current CFL head man, is an excellent quarterback teacher, but his college passers tended to be a bit robotic: They all dropped back, held the ball, and released it the same way. That made sense for raw high school and junior college passers who had to quickly learn the fine points of quarterbacking in order to execute Tedford’s pro-style attack, but great NFL passers must make their fundamentals serve them, not the other way around. …

The offense Rodgers operates in Green Bay is based on the same ideas, concepts, and even specific plays that Hackett, McCarthy, and Montana used in Kansas City and that Montana and Hackett had run with the 49ers, all of which is rooted in Walsh’s West Coast offense. While most people think of short timing passes when they hear the term “West Coast offense,” Walsh’s coaching tree — and the coaching tree of his coaching tree — is so long because his insights extended beyond well-designed pass plays to encompass a uniquely thorough, detailed approach to game planning, analyzing defensive weaknesses, and teaching and developing players. Those precepts are Walsh’s true legacy, and they now fuel the Packers’ offensive success.

In McCarthy’s early years, he immersed himself in Walsh’s ideas and language — 22 Z-In, 2 Jet X-Sluggo Seam, and so on. But rather than adhering religiously to those lessons, McCarthy and Rodgers have crafted a version of Walsh’s offense that constantly evolves to keep pace with a changing game. Quoting former Chiefs assistant Jimmy Raye, McCarthy once told USA Today: “‘Football is a cycle. You’re going to see things in this league or out of this league and in college football.’ It’s very important to stay on the front side of that cycle.” The Packers’ offense may be rooted in the playbook McCarthy learned from Hackett 20-plus years ago, but it works because he and Rodgers have subtly blended in new-school tactics.

While the West Coast offense dominated the NFL in the 1990s and early 2000s, it has increasingly fallen out of favor because its emphasis on precision and preparation has too often translated into inflexibility and needless complexity. The traditional West Coast offense features a seemingly countless number of plays — former Packers coach Mike Holmgren once said his playbook contained at least 1,500 plays — because on each play each player had a specific job, such as running a post or a slant. As a result, the only way to take advantage of a shifting, evolving defense was to add yet another new play and hope to call it at the right time, in what amounted to an impossibly hard game of rock-paper-scissors.

That’s not a feasible approach against modern, malleable defenses, and with Rodgers under center, it’s also not necessary. For example, one of the Packers’ most productive pass plays is “three verticals,” in which Green Bay’s receivers have the option to change their routes based on the coverage, trusting Rodgers to see their adjustments in real time.

Chris B. Brown

On this play against the Panthers, both outside receivers, Jordy Nelson and Davante Adams, can run either straight down the field on “go” routes (as Nelson does to Rodgers’s right) or stop after 12 to 15 yards if the defender is playing soft coverage (as Adams does to Rodgers’s left). Meanwhile, the slot receiver, Randall Cobb, runs a “middle read”: If the defense plays with two safeties deep, Cobb will split the safeties and run deep down the middle, but if there’s a deep middle safety like on this play, he’ll turn his route into a square-in and break across the field into Rodgers’s vision.

While this play, which the Packers run over and over again, requires Rodgers and his receivers to all be on the same page — and requires Rodgers to process all of this information and make an accurate throw in fractions of a second — it also replaces as many as 10 different plays from the traditional West Coast offense.

This idea of multiple concepts within each play flows through Green Bay’s offense. Under Favre and in Rodgers’s early seasons, this typically meant combining multiple pass concepts within the same play and letting the QB pick the side based on the defense. More recently, however, the Packers have made extensive use of “packaged plays,” which combine run blocking from the offensive line with screens or downfield passes by the receivers, while the QB has the option to hand off to a running back or throw downfield.

Under McCarthy, Green Bay was among the first NFL teams to begin using packaged plays, which first began bubbling up in college football roughly five years ago. (McCarthy has several friends coaching college on whom he leans for new ideas, including Kevin Sumlin, the forward-thinking coach at Texas A&M.) The above inside zone running play married to quick “pop” or seam routes by the slot receivers is straight from college football, and is a simple way to keep defenses honest if they try to crash down on Eddie Lacy and Green Bay’s increasingly productive run game. It’s also a way for the Packers to use Rodgers’s quick decision-making ability without putting him in harm’s way.

But the Packers’ success doesn’t stem solely from their ability to embrace the latest and greatest; while Green Bay excels at innovating, it’s also better than any other NFL team at executing many of the same plays Walsh used with Montana, most notably the slant pass. Hard as it is to believe, few NFL teams consistently throw the quick slant anymore, as most have replaced it with skinny posts or quick square-ins, or stopped bothering altogether. Put on a Packers game, though, and it can feel like watching old 49ers game film.

It’s not uncommon for Rodgers to complete five to 10 slant passes in a game — he likes them against soft coverage because they give him easy access, and he loves them against the blitz. When New England tried to bring pressure on Rodgers late in the half, he checked into a basic slant to Nelson and, 45 yards later, Green Bay had scored.

… Rodgers is a few Super Bowls shy of earning direct comparisons to Montana, but — particularly compared to Peyton Manning’s manic nerdiness and Tom Brady’s newfound love of high fives, head butts, and F-bombs — he’s the closest thing we have to a modern-day Joe Cool: This season alone, Rodgers pointedly told Packers fans to R-E-L-A-X after a loss and, on one of the most remarkable plays I’ve ever seen, calmly threw a game-winning touchdown pass without even bothering to buckle his chin strap.

pass without even bothering to buckle his chin strap.

By all accounts, Rodgers has always been this way. At a coaching clinic in 2011, Tedford recalled that, before the aforementioned crucial game against USC, Rodgers “was just walking around in the locker room with a smile on his face and getting [his teammates] going, but also getting them relaxed. He was not going haywire and yelling and screaming. He had this confidence about himself, and his leadership ability was unbelievable.”

Of course, similarities in demeanor between Rodgers and Montana wouldn’t matter if the two weren’t also so similar on the field. “When I think about fundamental quarterback play, I think of Aaron and Joe Montana,” McCarthy told the Sentinel. “The productivity is obviously there, but just the way they play the position — their footwork, the balance, the athletic ability, the accuracy of the football, the vision.” I see it too. Montana’s gifts were his accuracy, his decision-making, and his feet, and Rodgers boasts those same attributes — plus a stronger arm.

Michael Silver flashes back to the Packers’ last game:

The counterintuitive cheer rang out like a crescendo, just after Detroit Lions defensive lineman Jason Jones charged through the line and came crashing down upon quarterback Matt Flynn, and five confused Green Bay Packers offensive linemen weren’t sure what had hit them.

“We were like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ” said Packers guard Josh Sitton, recalling the third play from scrimmage of the second half of Green Bay’s NFC North-deciding regular-season finale. “We had just given up a sack, and we’re going, ‘Are they sarcastically cheering?’ It was about to be a new low.

“Then we got to the sideline and our offensive line coach said, ‘Hey, 12’s back out here. We’ll see what happens.’ ”

As the Packers, 78,408 fervent fans at Lambeau Field and millions of TV viewers would soon be reminded, magic happens quite frequently when Aaron Rodgers emerges from the tunnel and steps onto a football field. For the second consecutive year, Rodgers’ timely return from an injury in Week 17 would deliver a dramatic division title for the Pack. In this case, Green Bay secured a first-round bye with its 30-20 triumph over the Lions, setting up Sunday’s divisional-round clash at home against the Dallas Cowboys.

It also, in all likelihood, clinched a second regular-season Most Valuable Player trophy for a quarterback whose growing standard of greatness mesmerizes fans, coaches, opponents and teammates alike. …

And now, remarkably, Rodgers is every bit the Titletown treasure that predecessor Brett Favre was — and, true to his unrelenting nature, he’s far from satisfied. Though many highly astute football figures, including future Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady, have said that Rodgers is playing quarterback at the highest level the sport has seen, the 31-year-old superstar dismisses such proclamations as “idle talk.”

As Rodgers said in a recent interview at Lambeau, “I still know I can play better, and I’m always looking for ways to get better. Whether it’s a six-touchdown game, and I’m pissed about a check I didn’t make in the second half that would have given me a chance to get seven … it’s that desire to be perfect. It’s the greatest asset sometimes, and it can be the greatest curse, because it’s hard to turn off.”

In the process, he’s turning out to be one of those players his teammates will tell their grandkids about, and whose heroic feats may only be slightly exaggerated long after his bust has settled into its permanent resting spot in Canton.

Consider the scene at Lambeau two Sundays ago. Nursing a painful left calf injury as he took the field against the Lions, Rodgers was slipping away from the pass rush late in the first half when he suddenly felt a shooting pain in the afflicted leg. That Rodgers managed to thread a 4-yard touchdown pass to receiver Randall Cobb before hitting the ground, giving the Packers a 14-0 lead, was of small consolation to the stunned masses. Rodgers would later concede that he initially thought he had torn his Achilles tendon.

“When he went down, it looked like he got shot,” said Packers linebacker A.J. Hawk, one of Rodgers’ closest friends on the team. “I didn’t think he was coming back. We figured, as a defense, ‘Let’s stand up — we need to do this.’ Then I heard the crowd.”

Just after Flynn absorbed that drive-killing sack to start the second half, Rodgers emerged from the tunnel, blessedly still in uniform. Though the Lions would score a touchdown on the ensuing drive, tying the score at 14, the sight of Rodgers taking warmup tosses on the sideline infused the stadium with a surreal sense of serenity.

“It was like a cliché movie thing,” Hawk said. “The crowd’s cheering, but this isn’t the right time. Then I saw that he had come back out — and he wasn’t in street clothes. I honestly wasn’t sure if he would try to play … or, if he did, if he was gonna last more than a few plays.

“And, of course, it was a magical second half. It was like Willis Reed, limping back out of the tunnel. Just one more story to add to his legend.”

Certainly, Rodgers earned the comparison to Reed, who stunned a Madison Square Garden crowd by surfacing just before tipoff of Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals and, despite a torn thigh muscle, propelling the New York Knicks to a victory over the Los Angeles Lakers.

On a more contemporary — and personal — level, he channeled the unrivaled resilience of Favre, whose penchant for playing through pain was immortalized by his record streak of 297 regular-season starts. …

In the process of affirming his ability, Rodgers has proven to be a strong-willed, ultra-competitive and exacting leader, one who carries himself with almost a coach-like presence among his peers.

“He expects everyone to put the work in just like he does,” Sitton said. “He brings a pad and a pen to every meeting and takes notes. It might be s— that he’s seen 100 times, but he prides himself on knowing every facet of this offense.”

That, not surprisingly, provokes creative tension with the man in charge of the Packers’ offense, and of the team as a whole: Mike McCarthy, who took over after Rodgers’ rookie season and is now the league’s fourth-longest-tenured head coach with his current team.

Upon hearing the suggestion that he and McCarthy are like Spinal Tap’s “two visionaries,” a reference to the infamous recording-session screaming match between guitarists David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel in the cult-classic rockumentary, Rodgers laughed and said, “That’s a good analogy.”

Said Seneca Wallace, the veteran who spent the 2013 season as a Rodgers backup: “It was interesting. You hear different stories about coaches and quarterbacks (clashing), and when the head coach also calls the plays, it’s a whole other dynamic. They’re both very opinionated. Aaron’s a very intelligent quarterback, and Mike is a very intelligent and headstrong head coach who wants things done his way.

“When you’ve got two headstrong guys going at it, it’s kind of like a chess match. Each one is trying to figure out what the next move is. They’re going to war together, and if something goes on, they’ll come back and hug it out. It’s not like it gets out of hand. Whatever they’ve got going on with their chemistry, it works for them.”

To McCarthy, the challenge is to balance “the responsibility of calling plays with Aaron, but also the responsibility of managing the game for the whole team. There’ve been times, especially as a young coach, where I was too emotionally aggressive on the sidelines.”

Rodgers, suffice it to say, is not emotionally passive — be it in practice, meetings or games.

“Coach McCarthy always talks about alpha dogs — well, they’re like two alphas going at it,” Hawk said. “Man, it’s intense. It’s really fun to watch. They spend a lot of time together, one-on-one … watching film, going over the game plan, talking over plays. There’s so much respect back and forth, and they’re both passionate.”

The two visionaries made beautiful music together this year, as Rodgers threw for 4,381 yards, completed 65.6 percent of his passes and tallied 38 scoring tosses while serving up just five interceptions. His 112.2 passer rating was second only to Tony Romo’s 113.2, and the Packers’ 12-4 record was their best since the then-defending champions went 15-1 in 2011, with Rodgers earning MVP honors.

“Mike and I have got a really good relationship,” Rodgers said. “It’s been tested over the years. There’ve been so many highs, and a couple of moments of friction. But the moments of friction just make things better between us. Because, at the end of the day, we both want the same thing: We desperately want to win, and we want to do it all the time. And we are passionate about doing things the right way, and winning.

“We love to win. And we hate to lose. We probably hate to lose more than we love to win. And that’s why we want it so badly. Our relationship has grown so much over the years. It’s just a trust that he allows me to do some things on the field, and I trust him to make the right calls. He gives me enough freedom. I try not to abuse that.

“For sure, there’s some fiery moments. But I think we both know each other well enough that the last thing that either of us want to do is disrespect each other.”

Sometimes, the friction occurs because Rodgers goes off script and doesn’t include McCarthy in the improv sketch. Whereas Saints coach Sean Payton and quarterback Drew Brees seem, in a football sense, to be completing one another’s sentences, McCarthy and Rodgers can be more like screenplay collaborators who divvy up the scenes.

“Mike might call two plays, and then they’ll go no-huddle,” Wallace said. “So of the 70 plays in a game, Aaron might end up calling 40. But it really eats at Mike when he doesn’t know what play Aaron is calling. He’ll be like, ‘What the f—? What is he calling?’ ”

In Rodgers’ defense, he’s pretty damned good at it. For starters, his football IQ is Mensa-esque. Hawk says that he occasionally picks the quarterback’s brain about offenses the Packers are preparing to face, “and he’ll start to go into a 30-minute dissertation about what defenses do, what works, what the upcoming opponent will do and why it won’t work. He goes into such depth and detail. He’s one of those dudes who thinks like 10 steps ahead. So if you ask him a question like that, you’d better not be in a hurry.”

Asked if he could emulate his old-school predecessors who routinely called their own plays, Rodgers said, “I think so.” He’s being modest — he knows so.

“Remember that game at the end of the (2011) season, after they’d already clinched home-field (advantage throughout the playoffs), when (then and current backup) Matt Flynn went off against Detroit?” Wallace said, referring to the 45-41 Green Bay victory in which Flynn set franchise records for passing yards (480, since tied by Rodgers in 2013) and touchdown passes (six, also since tied, twice, by Rodgers — before halftime of the Pack’s blowout victory over the Bears last Nov. 9).

“I think Aaron called 100 percent of those plays, or darn near close, from what he told me. That just tells you the respect level Mike has for him, and the level that they’re both on intellectually.”

It was that respect level that led McCarthy to implement more no-huddle packages in 2012, thus increasing Rodgers’ play-calling responsibilities. He reduced them in 2013, concluding that he was putting too much on his quarterback.

“It’s not that he couldn’t (call his own plays),” McCarthy said. “When you talk football with him, he’s ‘coach-smart’ now — he knows the line call, the blocking schemes and what every receiver is doing. Really, what we learned through our process is, it’s not that he can’t. It’s how much responsibility can one man carry on a team?

“Nobody plays faster in the league than this guy — the way he sees the game, the way he gets the ball out of his hands. I realized I was stressing out, and potentially slowing down, the best player on my team.” …

Midway through last season, a groan reverberated throughout Lambeau after Rodgers went down with a broken left clavicle during a Monday night defeat to the Bears. As the Packers struggled to stay afloat during his eight-week absence, Rodgers spent much of his time in the training room, where he and the people treating him amused themselves by sifting through letters, voicemails and emails from fans offering unconventional remedies.

“Our training staff started collecting this stuff, and we’d read them, just as a way to deal with the frustration of not being out there, to provide some comic relief at times,” Rodgers recalled. “The root of it was that people wanted to help. Some of them were interesting ideas that made you go, ‘Hmmm.’ Some of them were just pure comedy — different things they could put on (the clavicle), whether it was some sort of cream or rub, or animal extract, or some sort of light therapy that would be the cure-all.”

And what was Rodgers’ favorite suggestion? “Energy therapy,” he said, laughing. “It was a letter (in which) somebody wrote, ‘If I can just touch him … just touch his affected area, he’ll be back on the field next week.’ ”

Eight weeks later, Rodgers returned for the team’s final regular-season game, a division-title showdown with the Bears in Chicago, and delivered a miracle of his own.

Down 28-27 and facing a fourth-and-8 with 46 seconds remaining, Rodgers took a shotgun snap and faced immediate pressure from Bears pass rusher Julius Peppers (now a Packers teammate). After sliding to his left to evade the sack, Rodgers launched a 48-yard touchdown pass to Randall Cobb that ranked as one of the most stirring plays in franchise history.

Carrying on the Packers’ storied legacy is important to Rodgers. While things were understandably chilly with Favre during that surreal summer of 2008, Rodgers has made a point of helping to repair relations, ultimately facilitating plans for Favre’s jersey to be retired at Lambeau next season.

“I think Brett deserves his due for what he did for this organization, this city and this franchise,” Rodgers said. “So, it’s time to bring him back. I think that in some people’s eyes, they were worried about how I would react to that. And so it was just important for me to show those people that, you know what, I’m 100 percent on-board with this. Because it has nothing to do with me — Brett should be back in the fold, and should be honored the way he deserves to be honored.”

Rodgers, understandably, has never felt so secure in his position, even as he pushes himself and his teammates toward that elusive standard of perfection. He’s still adjusting to life as a celebrity — and now has a famous girlfriend in actress Olivia Munn, further intensifying a “life (that is) not really normal anymore.”

That said, Rodgers is determined not to stay ensconced in a football-centric bubble.

“I think he takes pride in being intellectual and in touch with what’s going on around the world,” Hawk said. “He’s obviously all about football, but it’s not just football. He’s so curious. If I mention a book that he hasn’t read yet, or hasn’t heard of, he’ll take out his phone, make a note, and actually buy it and read it.

“He’s curious, always asking questions, always learning. There are a million things he’s interested in … politics, entertainment, current events. If he walks by your lunch table and hears you talking about something, he’ll sit down and give you his opinion — and he’s not shy about debating you.”

And when Rodgers debates, as with everything he does, he’s in it to win it.

“You wanna know how competitive he is?” Sitton asked. “One day early this season, we have this play (in practice) where he basically has to launch the ball as far as he can out of bounds … running time off the clock when there are six or seven seconds left and it’s fourth down so there’s no time left for another play. I told him, ‘You don’t have the arm for that anymore. You’re too old.’ He looked at me like, ‘FU,’ and launched that ball so f—– far, it was ridiculous. That’s how he is.”

Said Hawk: “We hang out with him, and we’re big into board games and different types of charades-type games. If your team is trying to come up with topics, he’ll sit in the corner by himself coming up with terms he’s so proud of. He wants to come up with some stuff you’ve never heard of. If one of his references comes up, and the other team gets it, he’ll get so mad. He wants to dominate.” …

After emerging from the tunnel to finish off the regular-season finale against the Lions, Rodgers was clearly uncomfortable, yet he refrained from playing up the drama to his teammates. Even when he scored on an improbable sneak to put the Pack up by two touchdowns in the fourth quarter, a decision that apparently was his brainchild — “I didn’t think it was the brightest call by Aaron,” Sitton said — Rodgers was all business.

“It wasn’t really a big production,” Sitton said. “At one point, he said, ‘I’m gonna need some time, guys.’ But it was definitely that feeling that the competition, that going to battle with us, was more important than his injury. It was definitely a big moment.”

Perhaps, for a man whose path to football stardom has seldom been paved with gold, Rodgers’ muted reaction to such challenging circumstances isn’t surprising. Adversity, be it Ndamukong Suh’s foot bearing down on his tender left leg late in that Lions game or a van full of sneeringly skeptical high schoolers, has been a constant part of the journey — but, in Rodgers’ eyes, his has been the road best traveled.

“It’s a lot better,” he said. “As tough as it’s been, at times, that road is a satisfying one. And as you move forward, you take the high road and try and do things the right way — you try to make it about the team, and you try to stay humble when you’re having great success. That’s the satisfying road.”