For the second consecutive day, Mike McCarthy and his unceremonious breakup with the Green Bay Packers have been making headlines.
On Wednesday, McCarthy detailed to ESPN’s Rob Demovsky that Green Bay could not have handled his midseason and post-game firing “any worse.” On Thursday, Bleacher Report’s Tyler Dunne released an exhaustive article detailing the deterioration of the relationship between McCarthy and quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
Among the accusations levied against the former Packers coach, who was fired following a Dec. 13th loss to the lowly Arizona Cardinals at Lambeau Field, in the B/R article is that McCarthy would miss meetings to have massages in his office at the team facility.
McCarthy denied those claims and refuted other aspects of the article to NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero on Thursday.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start and stop with the article,” the former Packers coach told Pelissero. “But to say that I skipped a team meeting for a massage is utterly absurd.”
McCarthy added, laughing, “I have a massage scheduled tomorrow, and I can promise you I will not miss my primary responsibility of picking up my two kids from school.”
The coach told Pelissero that while he did used to get massages in his office, those instances occurred around 2010, when Green Bay was not struggling and in fact making postseason runs.
Among the players on the record in the B/R article were Ryan Grant, Greg Jennings, DuJuan Harris and Jermichael Finley.
One former Packers receiver, however, disagreed with some of his teammates’ evaluations of both McCarthy and Rodgers. NFL Network’s James Jones called the report “just a bunch of people’s opinions.”
“I’m getting a bunch of texts from my former teammates and they’re like where was I at when this was going on?” Jones said on Total Access on Thursday night. “I don’t remember any of this stuff going on.
“When you’re with someone for 13 years, you’re gonna have some fight, you’re gonna have some arguments. … Aaron Rodgers respected Mike, and Mike respected Aaron. When it came to times where things weren’t going right or Aaron thought things should be going this way or Mike thought things should be going this way, it’ll be some conflict.
“One thing I do want to say is coach Mike would have us out there running a bunch of new plays. We’re thinking we’re going to run these plays in the game and then we get in the game and we don’t run any of these plays. I think that’s where the frustration comes with Aaron Rodgers. We’re running the same stuff but we put in 20 new plays that we’re not running.”