Bob Sturm has been great to listen to these last 2 days about McCarthy. He said he has watched every single snap of both McCarthy and Garrett's career. He said he wrote an extensive article in The Athletic on McCarthy. Starting with his younger years and how he got to Green Bay. I wish I could read it.
In this past segment, he shot down these comparisons of him and Garrett and I had no idea how different they were in their approaches. Here are a few differences and some of the stat rankings may be off a little since its off top of my head.
On 1st and 10, Jason was 1st in the NFL running the ball. McCarthy was 32nd.
On 4th and 4+ in the first 3 quarters (Bob took out the 4th quarter ones due to desperation), Garrett is pretty much dead last in attempts and McCarthy is at the top.
While Garrett has only coached 76% of McCarthy's career, he has less total challenges than McCarthy has challenges won. That's pretty crazy. He said Garrett was way too conservative with challenges and took the approach its better to save them and then a lot of the time, that time never came so they were wasted. 45 total challenges in 10 years seems very low, seeing as you get 2 per game x16 x10.
On 2nd and 10, McCarthy was towards the top of the league in passing the ball. Garrett was towards the bottom.
That is the biggest difference for me. The approach on 1st and 2nd downs. 2nd and 10 was a running down for us. Never failed. And we would always get into 3rd down, many times 3rd and long. McCarthy actually prefers to pass on 2nd and 10. Now lets see if that changes now that he has Zeke and Dak as opposed to Rodgers and no real run game.
Bob said 2 of the biggest reasons McCarthy gets the label as being a Garrett like conservative coach is a few instances. One being the 2014 NFC championship game against Seattle. Where he kicked a FG on 4th and goal from the 1. They scored on 5 possessions before the 4th qtr and only had 19 points. 1 TD and 4FGs. I remember that game and he definitely went the route of Turtle Tom and tried to run the clock more than trying to actively win the game. I thought that was a huge blunder. They should have easily won that game.
And the other instances is he had a tendency to get conservative in playoff games.
But he definitely does not run an antiquated early 90s offense like Garrett.