Mike McCarthy won’t be extended before Ted Thompson
The Green Bay Packers have reportedly shown strong interest in ironing out a contract extension with head coach Mike McCarthy, who is a consensus top ten head coach in this league and excels at working with talented players on offense. He’s a big reason why the Packers were able to win the Super Bowl in that memorable 2010-11 season, and he’s still done a solid job despite their lack of playoff success in the past three seasons. Team president Mark Murphy and the rest of the organization have no intention of letting him go at any time soon, and it would be a surprise for them to not lock him up.
More from Green Bay Packers
- Packers may have found Jordan Love a Travis Kelce-type
- 3 underrated moves Green Bay Packers made in 2023 offseason
- NFL Predictions: 5 Teams that will be drafting a quarterback in 2024
- NFL: Predicting the top 5 running attacks for the 2023 season
- Can Green Bay’s defense carry the Packers to the playoffs?
That said, it looks like an extension for McCarthy is contingent on an extension for GM Ted Thompson, who could even decide to hang up the spikes and foil any plans of an extension for his head coach. Both GM and HC have worked incredibly well together, and there’s no doubt that they are two of the most effective decision-makers in the game and deserve to be rewarded for their work.
The NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reports that he asked Murphy about how extension talks with McCarthy have been going, and the Packers president stated that the team will not extend their head coach until the GM is extended.
Why? Well, the logic here is that the Packers don’t want someone as talented as McCarthy to end up being forced into a lame-duck situation, and that’s definitely not a good thing for a team either. If they aren’t able to keep Thompson around for whatever reason (retirement, possibly), then they don’t want to force the GM to work with a head coach he is uncomfortable with and vice versa; that sort of friction can crush a team. That’s what the Packers are worried about long-term, and there are those ever-so-quiet rumblings that John Schneider could leave the reigning champion Seattle Seahawks for his dream job as the Packers GM after being an excellent exec for the organization before leaving for Seattle.