Today’s (as opposed to yesterday’s, or tomorrow’s, or next week’s) TMJ4 reports on something that has nothing to do with a jaw disorder:

The coach and quarterback of the 1996 Super Bowl Champion Green Bay Packers admit that had they stayed together in Green Bay, the Packers might have more Lombardi Trophies in their collection.

“Had we stayed together, I think we win several more championships,” admitted Brett Favre in a shared interview with his then-coach, Mike Holmgren, in a recent interview with KJR Radio in Seattle.

“We were fortunate enough to win one together…but I think better things were yet to come had we stayed together.”

“Do you realize what my record would be as a head coach as I’d stayed with him? It would be phenomenal,” said Holmgren.  He departed Favre and the Packers in 1998 when the Seahawks hired him to be coach and general manager. …

“Had it not been for you at that time in my career…I needed someone who was firm, and also forgiving.  I really believe that,” said Favre.  “I was as raw as they come.  I needed someone who was patient…but also was understanding.  Had it not been for you at that time, I definitely would not have played 20 years.”

As Holmgren joked, “He was in the principal’s office all the time.”

The what-if game is fun to play, but some corrective history is in order here. After winning Super Bowl XXXI, Holmgren spent the next two seasons tamping down speculation that later proved correct, that he was looking to become a general manager/coach somewhere besides Green Bay. Holmgren left for Seattle because the Packers had a general manager, Ron Wolf, and he wasn’t ready to retire. Past history of the Packers’ general manager/coaches — Phil Bengtson, Dan Devine, Bart Starr and Forrest Gregg — made it obvious that a GM/coach would not work.

Or so it seemed. Holmgren left for Seattle, replaced for one season by Ray Rhodes. After Wolf fired Rhodes, he hired Mike Sherman. And then, one season after that, Wolf suddenly retired, and Sherman suddenly took over as GM and coach.

There is more to this than many Packer fans know, and there is also an element of history repeating itself. Bengtson, Devine, Starr and Gregg became GM/coaches because Vince Lombardi was the GM/coach. And that was the case for all but Lombardi’s last season in Green Bay; he resigned as coach after Super Bowl II and named Bengtson his successor. A season later, Lombardi left Green Bay for Washington to become the Redskins’ GM and coach, with part-ownership of the team thrown in. That’s obviously not an option for the Packers.

Meanwhile, the Packers decided after Gregg left that GM and coach were one too many titles for one man, and so they hired Tom Braatz as GM and Lindy Infante as coach. As we know, the second hiring of GM (Wolf) and coach (Holmgren) proved better than the first.

So why did the Packers name Sherman as GM? Wolf’s sudden retirement put the Packers in a bind, in the same way that Holmgren’s departure put Wolf in a bind. It’s a fundamental rule for CEOs — no one is irreplaceable, and no one is permanent, so you always have to have in mind potential replacements for your key management people. In retrospect, the Packers didn’t do that.

The obvious choice to succeed Holmgren would have been quarterback coach Steve Mariucci, but he left two years earlier to become Cal’s head coach for one season before becoming the 49ers’ coach. When Holmgren left Green Bay, there was no one on staff qualified to replace him as head coach. Defensive coordinator Fritz Shurmur left with Holmgren for Seattle, as did most of Holmgren’s Packer assistants. Offensive coordinator Sherman Lewis didn’t get picked. Nor did tight ends/assistant offensive line coach Mike Sherman. Three days after Holmgren signed with Seattle, quarterbacks coach Andy Reid became the Eagles’ head coach. So Wolf brought in former Packers assistant Ray Rhodes, Reid’s predecessor in Philadelphia, and then told Rhodes to leave after an 8–8 season where team discipline notably decreased. Rhodes’ replacement? Sherman, who had left for Seattle.

Years after Sherman got his second promotion in as many seasons, Packers president Bob Harlan told me that the Packers were concerned about losing their scouting and player personnel staff, people a new GM would want to choose himself instead of inheriting an existing staff. Harlan’s philosophy was that the general manager was in complete charge of football operations, which included everyone below the GM, including the head coach. The Packers again felt there was really no one else on the staff qualified to replace Wolf as GM. (Including director of player personnel Ted Thompson, director of pro personnel Reggie McKenzie, and director of college scouting John Dorsey. All three are now NFL general managers, including Thompson, who would go on to replace Sherman as GM and then fire him as coach.) That was how it looked at the time, and when you present the facts, it’s difficult to see what other choice the Packers could have made except by second-guessing.

The revisionist history in Holmgren’s statement isn’t only in the obvious, that Holmgren left Green Bay because of his ego. The Packers lost free agent acquisitions Keith Jackson, Sean Jones, Santana Dotson and Reggie White to retirement, and none of them were ever really replaced. Other acquisitions, Desmond Howard and Eugene Robinson, left for other teams. Wolf’s last four drafts produced more busts (offensive lineman John Michels and Ross Verba, wide receiver Derrick Mayes, defensive lineman Vonnie Holliday) than even serviceable players (offensive linemen Marco Rivera and Mike Flanagan, safety Darren Sharper, cornerback Mike McKenzie, punter Josh Bidwell, and wide receiver Donald Driver). Wolf himself admitted that his biggest regret was not finding playmaker wide receivers for Favre after the Super Bowls. It’s not a stretch at all to say that Aaron Rodgers has much better receivers now than Favre ever did in Green Bay.

In retrospect, given the past few paragraphs, it should be obvious that Favre really was as good as he seemed to be at the time. Naysayers argued, and argue now, that Favre threw too many interceptions. But when you consider that Favre never had an elite receiver, had only one elite running back (Ahman Green), and had offensive lines that, except for one season (2004), were no better than average, not to mention some dubious defenses, Favre actually accomplished more than he should have been able to accomplish.

Holmgren fell victim to the self-applied Peter Principle — that if you can get to the Super Bowl as a coach, you should be able to run the entire football show. Bill Parcells won two Super Bowls with the New York Giants and got to one with New England, then the Big Tuna wanted to run the whole show, and his tenures with the Jets and in Dallas resulted in zero Super Bowl appearances. Jimmy Johnson won two Super Bowls in Dallas, clashed with owner/GM Jerry Jones, and went to Miami to run the whole show. Johnson didn’t get back to the Super Bowl, and Jones hasn’t gotten back to the Super Bowl. Mike Shanahan more or less ran the show in Denver, winning two Super Bowls, but couldn’t sustain that success, and had no success at all in Washington. Holmgren didn’t get to the Super Bowl with the Seahawks until his GM responsibilities were taken away from him. (However, even though Holmgren wasn’t the GM anymore, players Holmgren drafted, including running back Shaun Alexander, and acquired, including quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, were on the Super Bowl team.)

One important reason to separate the GM and coach roles, besides the obvious fact that each is a full-time job, is to provide a buffer between each and the players. Whether you’re on the team or not should be up to the GM; how much you play should be up to the coach. Sherman had some problems with some players because of one of those sides (it’s not clear which). If a GM doesn’t pay a player what the player thinks he’s worth, the coach can commiserate. If a player feels like he’s being mistreated by a coach, he can sound off to the GM. That’s not possible if the GM and the coach are the same person.

So that brings up an interesting what-if. Let’s say Holmgren had stayed in Green Bay, and let’s say Wolf had retired the same year he actually did retire. Keeping everything else the same, one could conclude that the only person on staff that Harlan would have felt was qualified to be general manager was … Holmgren. Packer fans can wonder if Holmgren would have ended up as the Packers’ GM/coach, and for how long. Or perhaps the Packers would have hired a general manager, but who was actually under the coach on the management chart, as the 49ers had with Bill Walsh. Or Holmgren could have stayed GM/coach for some number of seasons, grooming an assistant to take over for him as head coach, as Wisconsin did with Barry Alvarez and Bret Bielema.

Remember, however, that Seattle got to its first Super Bowl after taking away Holmgren’s GM duties. Holmgren took with him not only most of the Packers’ assistant coaches, but much of Wolf’s staff. That makes one think the scenario of Holmgren the grand poobah of all Packer football wouldn’t have worked any better in Green Bay than it did in Seattle. (Holmgren then was hired and fired as the president of the Browns.)

Holmgren and Favre can fantasize (along with Packer fans) about what could have been, but there’s one more important reason why they overstate what they could have accomplished. That’s because the NFL is built to not have dynasties in this salary-cap era. A sportswriter wrote that the year after a team wins a Super Bowl, it plays 16 Super Bowls the next season. That was certainly the case with the Packers after Super Bowl XXXI, that was the case for the Ravens this season, and that will be the case for the Seahawks next season.

For one thing, players’ egos get in the way. Stars (Favre then, Rodgers now) get paid fine, but the second- and third-level players start to think they’re better than they are, and so they go to financially greener pastures with promises of greater on-field roles. (Desmond Howard, the next-to-last puzzle piece on the Super Bowl XXXI team, left after the season for Oakland, and was never the same player again.)

For another thing, the puzzle starts getting disassembled. Assistant coaches and those who work for the GM get snapped up by other teams for bigger roles. That was how Holmgren got to Green Bay,  and that’s why Reid wasn’t around to replace him after Holmgren left. Note that three Wolf assistants from the 1990s Packer teams are now general managers, including Thompson and Seattle GM John Schneider. To keep people like the Steelers’ defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau (who was, believe it or don’t, Starr’s defensive backs coach before Gregg hired him in Cincinnati), those assistant coaches have to be happy where they are and not looking to move on.

This might come up again in the next few years if the Packers get back to the Super Bowl. McCarthy could, as Holmgren did, overestimate his abilities and think he can be somebody’s GM/coach too. The fact that it works in one place, New England (although it seems no one has the title of general manager), doesn’t mean it’s a model that should be emulated.

Beyond those realities, the last reality is that once you win, the rest of the league is gunning for you. In fact, once anyone has some success with something remotely different (i.e. the 49ers’ and Seahawks’ read option), the rest of the league will spend the offseason studying it and figuring out how to beat it. (Those who are not looking to do it themselves; the “West Coast” offense is now the standard NFL offense.) With video study, the rest of the NFL will know everything there is to know about how Wilson plays quarterback, how the Seahawks play defense, and so on. The NFL really does stand for “Not For Long.”