Certainly, if you're looking at the specifics, McCarthy left some opportunities on the table. Before Rodgers even took over, McCarthy lost as a 7.5-point favorite against the Giants during the 2007 playoffs in a 23-20 game in which Brett Favre threw a critical interception in overtime. The Packers rode a hot streak to the Super Bowl three years later, their lone trip during the McCarthy era.
The Packers were 5-6 in the playoffs after their Super Bowl win. Their victories were over teams quarterbacked by Joe Webb, Kirk Cousins, Eli Manning, Dak Prescott and Tony Romo in the infamous Dez Bryant catch rule game. They were ripped apart twice by Colin Kaepernick, lost as eight-point favorites to end a 15-1 season at home against Eli's Giants, and were blown out by Matt Ryan in what was McCarthy's last playoff game, the 2016 NFC Championship Game.
McCarthy deserves blame, at least in part, for the other two games. In the legendary January 2016 Packers-Cardinals playoff tilt where Rodgers brought the Packers back with two Hail Mary completions on the same drive to tie the game, McCarthy decided against a two-pointer to try to win the game and instead kicked an extra point to send the game to overtime. His team had lost multiple receivers to injury, but the Packers had just ripped the Cardinals' hearts out and were seven-point underdogs. One play from the 2-yard line on offense was a better idea than going to a full overtime, where the Cardinals picked up a 75-yard completion on the opening play from scrimmage and scored two plays later.
Maybe McCarthy deserves only a bit of criticism for that one. When it comes to the 2014 NFC Championship Game, though, McCarthy bungled his way into a crushing loss. I wrote about this at the time, when McCarthy kicked two sub-20-yard field goals to start the game, ran the ball on third-and-3 to set up a fourth-and-1 field goal try, and said after the game that he was calling second-half running plays to try to hit a total of 20 rushing attempts in the second half.
The latter is a brutal conflation of cause and effect, and as Mike Tanier noted, the Packers were probably better off setting a target of three second-half kneel-downs if McCarthy was going to misapply math. I won't get into McCarthy's erratic late-game decision-making in the regular season or the time Jordy Nelson had to try to hide the challenge flag McCarthy incorrectly threw, but at the very least, the Packers should have represented the NFC in Super Bowl XLIX.
Let's look at it on a much broader level. I can think of eight quarterbacks who were drafted after 1980, didn't spend time in the CFL or USFL, and count as surefire, first-ballot, no-doubt Hall of Famers: Troy Aikman, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, John Elway, Brett Favre, Peyton Manning, Dan Marino and Ben Roethlisberger. Those guys were competing against one another (and some in cases, with Rodgers) for Super Bowl appearances, so we can get an abstract sense of how frequently a dominant quarterback in the modern era should sniff the Lombardi trophy.
Those passers combined for 126 seasons as starters (excluding 2018). Those seasons delivered 27 Super Bowl appearances and 16 victories. In other words, they made the Super Bowl once every 4.7 healthy seasons and won it once every 7.9 seasons.
Rodgers' debut season as the Packers' starter didn't come until age 25, thanks to three seasons spent as Favre's understudy. He completed eight full or nearly-full seasons as a starter, excluding the 2013 and 2017 campaigns. Those eight seasons have delivered one Super Bowl appearance and one ring. In other words, Rodgers has won almost exactly the number of Super Bowls we would have expected given the success rate of other quarterbacks, and if the Packers had sneaked past the Seahawks and into Super Bowl XLIX, he would be right in line in terms of expected appearances, too. I think the expectations for eight (approaching nine) full seasons from Rodgers should be something in the range of two Super Bowl appearances and one win.
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Bill Barnwell wrote: