There are a number of people who feel the Green Bay Packers should have waited until the end of the season to fire longtime head coach Mike McCarthy, and it is safe to say Sean Payton is among them.
Payton was hired as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints in 2006, which was the same year McCarthy landed the Green Bay job. When reporters asked Payton on Wednesday about McCarthy being let go, he seemed genuinely distraught.
“Don’t get me started on that subject,” Payton said, per ESPN’s Mike Triplett. “He’s a close friend, a fantastic coach. … I hate it. I hated to see how it happened. He was the last one in our class, the year we were hired in ’06. But that’s the business.”
Payton added that seeing someone like McCarthy lose his job is an unfriendly reminder of the age-old cliche that the NFL is a business.
“As a head coach, the first thing you realize — winning, losing, wherever you’re at, it’s a business,” he said. “Just like it is for the player.”
Green Bay’s home loss to the Arizona Cardinals was one of the most embarrassing for the franchise in recent memory, especially since they were — and technically still are — in the playoff hunt. The timing of the McCarthy firing was more of a surprise than the decision itself, and even one member of the Packers’ coaching staff seemed to think McCarthy took the fall for issues Aaron Rodgers helped create. Not surprisingly, that coach has also been fired.
Payton knows how it feels to have the media calling for your job during a rough season, but Drew Brees has never openly criticized Payton’s offense the way Rodgers had done with McCarthy’s this season. Regardless of what Rodgers says about his personal relationship with McCarthy, that was a factor in the team’s decision to move on from the coach.
