The game has passed Mike by. He knows it's now time to hang up the headset and go enjoy life as a retired NFL head coach.
I would be shocked if Mike doesn't announce his retirement after this season.
He had a good run in Green Bay, and that he can be proud of. He was done when the Packers fired him in 2018. He has now accepted that the Packers made the right call.
The reason that Mike suddenly started losing in GB wasn’t because anything had passed him by. It was because their 100 year old GM Ted Thompson completely started drafting total garbage year after year and had an aversion to getting any help in free agency. His drafts were awful for several years before McCarthy finally started losing. Nobody was going to win with that crap roster, even with a Hall of Fame QB. Particularly on the defensive side of the ball, which was straight awful.
When the Packers finally decided they needed to go in a different direction, the first thing they did was “retire” Thompson and send him off with fanfare and love. They let Thompson keep his dignity and legacy and didn’t call it a firing, when that is what it was… and rightly so. He was terrible at the end.
Then they went in a different direction at head coach because they needed change. I would have done the same thing. After more than a decade with Mike, it was time for a new head coach.
The very first thing the new GM did was go on a huge free agency spending spree on defense because that defense wasn’t winning any games. Adrian Amos, Za’Darius Smith, and Preston Smith were big name defenders who helped transform the defense… which it needed badly. Give McCarthy those guys on defense and his record certainly would have been better because the defense in Mike’s last season was putrid.
I understand why casual Packer fans felt like they got rid of McCarthy, added Lafluer and improved a lot… but the difference was the GM adding talent way more than the coaching change. The roster needed huge help when Mike left and Guttennkuntstss changed it.