The human brain wants to see patterns. It’s hardwired into us, and for good reason: seeing patterns keeps us alive.
Ever since the first humans were hunting and gathering, we’ve relied on pattern recognition to keep us safe and fed. Here are those bushes where we found those tasty berries before; keep an eye out for some more. This looks just like the place my buddy got his face eaten off by a tiger; let’s be careful.
Pattern recognition isn’t doing quite the same work today that it used to, and sometimes
we get false positives. But I couldn’t help but notice a familiar refrain this week at the NFL’s Annual League Meeting.
After surviving fan demands for his job in the face of a losing skid to close out the regular season and a gutting playoff loss, Matt LaFleur wants to get back to basics.
“We’ve got to strip everything down and start like it’s Year 1 all over again and really get to the details of what we’re doing,” he told reporters in Phoenix.
What’s the pattern here? Well, it’s almost word-for-word what Mike McCarthy told reporters during the 2018 edition of the NFL’s Annual League Meeting.
“This offseason resembles a Year 1 offseason,” McCarthy said. “Obviously the defense is going through that because they’re building a brand-new playbook, new coaching staff, new philosophy. There is some carryover from our old defense. But offensively, when you have the same offensive system for 12 years, you’re playing late into the playoffs, you usually turn the page and evaluate and just try to evolve off what you did last year. We’ve taken a totally different approach. We’ve gone back to Page 1 in the playbook.”
McCarthy had just survived a difficult 2017 season. Anthony Barr’s rule-changing tackle broke Aaron Rodgers’ collarbone early in the year, and the Packers never recovered. McCarthy’s hand-developed backup to Rodgers, Brett Hundley, struggled, and by the time Rodgers returned for one ill-fated game, the Packers were on life support.
McCarthy cleaned house, turning over virtually his entire offensive and defensive staff in a last-ditch attempt to get the Packers back to the Super Bowl. It failed, of course. McCarthy was fired before the end of the 2018 season — his eighth since the Packers won it all.
LaFleur is entering his eighth season as the Packers’ head coach, and I can’t help but notice the pattern. After a disappointing season, he, like McCarthy before him, wants to metaphorically turn back to his first year, to get down to the little stuff, to strip everything he’s built down to nothing and start again from first principles.
LaFleur turned over his defensive staff by necessity, but didn’t make comparable changes on offense. The only substantive change on that side of the ball was promoting Luke Getsy to the dual role of quarterbacks coach and assistant head coach – offense. And considering how long Getsy has been with the Packers (this is his seventh different role with the team across two different stints since 2014), that’s hardly a major changeup.
How does that add up to the Packers going back to basics under LaFleur? Only time will tell, but if the pattern holds, it won’t be much of a change. It’s a pretty safe bet that the Packers’ offense will probably be more or less the same in 2026: inside zone, conservative passing (mixed with aggressive deep shots, sometimes at oddly chosen times), and generally just trying to out-execute opponents rather than leaning on his talent.
This is what we saw when McCarthy went back to basics. The Packers rolled out an offense in 2018 that was more or less identical to what McCarthy had always run, with some small changes as personnel continued to evolve, as it always does. Ultimately, that wasn’t good enough, and McCarthy was shown the door.
LaFleur should be wary of that same result. If he’s really striving for change, let’s hope, for his sake and ours, that the change is real. Otherwise, the result could be the same as it was for McCarthy. Sure, LaFleur just signed an extension, but so had McCarthy. He inked a one-year extension before the end of the 2017 season to avoid heading into 2018 as a lame duck, and it didn’t save him when 2018 went off the rails.
That’s a pattern LaFleur should be watching. His football future could depend on it.
