GREEN BAY – As Mike McCarthy set about the lengthy, unpleasant process last week of assessing what went wrong – and, to be fair, the many things that went right, too – during a 2012 season that ultimately ended in disappointment, the Green Bay Packers head coach did so firmly believing that his guys weren't that far removed from another NFL championship, like the one they won just two years ago in Super Bowl XLV.
“I don’t think you just take one segment of one game and determine how close you are to the championship,” McCarthy said, referring to the epic defensive failure in the team’s season-ending 45-31 loss to the San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Divisional Playoffs. “Our goal going into the season – looking back on it, part of the conversations I had with the coaching staff and then later with the personnel department – (was) to get this team to improve during the course of the year. I feel like we did that in some aspects, because you want to play your best football at the end of the year.
“San Francisco was the better team (that) night. We did not play our best football in that game, and that’s something I obviously as the head coach have to take a very, very close look at, because I thought we were ready mentally. There’s definitely some things we did not handle schematically, and no one will be tougher on that than ourselves.”
The process began with his players’ exit interviews, then continued with extensive one-on-one meetings with his three coordinators – defensive coordinator Dom Capers, offensive coordinator Tom Clements and special teams coordinator Shawn Slocum.
Jason Wilde wrote: