Where’s the Creativity from Packers Coach Mike McCarthy?

The worst thing about the Green Bay Packers losing their season-opener on a Thursday is that it gives people like me 10 days to talk about everything that went wrong.

In fact, so much went wrong on Thursday that some of the obvious wrongs are overshadowing other, less obvious, wrongs that also merit discussion. One of those overshadowed wrongs is the lack of offensive creativity from Packers coach Mike McCarthy.

I know what you’re probably thinking: “Great. Here comes some blowhard on a blog whining about the coach’s playcalling after his favorite team lost a game. How very sports talk radio.”

I’m not going to pick apart individual play calls and opine about whether McCarthy should have called a run or a pass. I am going to opine that the Packers offense was far too predictable on Thursday and has felt predictable for a while now.

We’ve seen opposing offenses achieve tremendous success by attacking the Packers’ defense with a little creativity in both scheme and formations. Read-options, jet sweeps and misdirection counters baffle the Packers run defense. Pre-snap motion and different formation packages create mismatches against individual Packers’ defenders, causing the entire defense to panic and disintegrate over the course of a game.

Whenever I watch a team like the Seahawks or 49ers do unique things on offense to steamroll the Packers, I wonder why the Packers don’t seem as creative when they have the ball.

Maybe the Packers defense is so bad that it looks like other offenses are more creative than they actually are. Maybe all the injuries the Packers suffer each season make getting creative a challenge. Maybe McCarthy thinks Aaron Rodgers and his offense are so good, there’s no need to overthink things and get too crazy.

I don’t know what the answer is, but there has to be a few wrinkles McCarthy can come up with to get players like Randall Cobb free in space or create favorable matchups for other playmakers. Heck, even a screen pass here or there might have helped a little on Thursday.

Having Rodgers take a traditional drop, scan the field, then scamper around while his receivers try and get open is starting to get old.

I’m not calling for a dramatic overhaul of the entire offense. Rodgers, Cobb, Jordy Nelson and Eddie Lacy doing their thing should result in plenty of points. But a little creativity from the coach — a jet-sweep to Cobb, a uniquely drawn-up screen, designed movement from Rodgers — to provide an extra boost against the NFL’s elite is needed.