The Report About Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy Hating Each Other is Music to This Masshole's Ears

So this morning, when I was busily hunching my stooped shoulders over the keyboard burping out a draft preview, that Bleacher Report article about the ugly, public, Jeff Bezos-like divorce between Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy came across my radar. And because I have the best co-workers of anybody in the country, I forwarded it to my friend Liz to make sure she had all the opportunity she needed to weigh in. The fact she was right all along about the real nature of how horribly dysfunctional this relationship was and wrote a great article about it validated my decision almost as much as Liz calling me her favorite Patriots writer. It’s mutual.

Now just to amplify one aspect of this report from the Masshole perspective:

[E]ven in the best of times—when confetti should’ve still been stuck to their clothing—one person who was then close to Rodgers remembers he would regularly call to vent that McCarthy didn’t have a clue what he was doing. He’d tell him that McCarthy frequently called the wrong play. That he used the wrong personnel. That they were running plays that worked one out of 50 times in practice. That McCarthy was a buffoon he was constantly bailing out.

“Mike has a low football IQ, and that used to always bother Aaron,” this source says. “He’d say Mike has one of the lowest IQs, if not the lowest IQ, of any coach he’s ever had.”

Adds a personnel man who worked for the Packers at the time: “He’s not going to respect you if he thinks he’s smarter than you.” …

One ex-Packers scout puts it on both. He describes Rodgers as an arrogant quarterback quick to blame everyone but himself—one who’s “not as smart as he thinks he is”—yet kindly points out that McCarthy basically quit on his team. …

But one former teammate, lamenting this colossal what-if, makes one point on the past crystal clear.

“If you were going to write a headline,” he says, “that would be it right there: How Egos Took Down the Packers.”

I post this not to pour brake fluid onto the sciatic nerve of Packers fans, with whom I have zero beefs. This is just to appreciate how fortunate we are as Patriots fans that this kind of petty, purely ego-driven nonsense doesn’t happen here. It didn’t happen when Tom Brady was passed over 198 times in the draft (to Rodgers’ 21 times). It didn’t when he was fourth on the quarterback depth chart behind Michael Bishop, who would go on to being cut by a Canadian team. It didn’t when Brady replaced Drew Bledsoe and a fully healthy Bledsoe didn’t get his job back. And it hasn’t happened through the 19 seasons since. Through a thousand bi-weekly meetings:

… and Brady’s favorite teammates being shipped away and historically tough losses and an allegedly huge falling over the role of Brady’s friend/business partner/mentor/pliability guru.

Belichick and Brady are two strong-willed apex predators who co-exist in the same ecosystem, work together for common goals and have mutual respect for one another that has never wavered. In spite of all the fake news the Seth Wickershams can cook up with anonymous sources about secret breakfast meetings no one can confirm. And clandestine sitdowns between Belichick and Roger Goodell that even Ginger Satan’s own staff says never took place but were taken as verified, gospel truth.

Again, I’m not dumping on Rodgers and McCarthy necessarily. Because what’s described in this report is how 99.99% of people act when they’ve been working with someone for too long. It’s human nature. Egos clash. People want credit for success and to deflect the blame for failure on somebody else. What’s remarkable isn’t that the Rodgers-McCarthy prom baby was left in a dumpster after just one trip to the Super Bowl. It’s that Brady and Belichick continue to work together, cooperate with one another, and admire each other, even after six championships.

And counting. All this does is make us all appreciate it even more. #StillHere.