Key to Green Bay Packers' Season Lies in Mike McCarthy's Play-Calling

Green Bay Packers head coach Mike McCarthy will call the team's plays for the final four games—three after the win over the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday—of the regular season, resuming a post that he repeatedly denied he would take throughout most of the season.

It's not that associate head coach Tom Clements did an abhorrent job handling the Packers' play-calling for the first 75 percent of the season. After all, the 9-4 Packers did start 6-0 with Clements at the helm.

But as Green Bay's play-calling became more predictable and less effective, it was clear the team needed a change—to everyone, apparently, but McCarthy.

The head coach was still rejecting the notion that he would take over at the helm back in November after the Packers' disheartening 18-16 loss to the Detroit Lions.

He explained why at the time, per ESPN.com's Rob Demovsky:

"

I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t think the game of football is ever that simple. I think the way you play, it is about the simplistic nature you go about—fundamentals and so forth. There’s a lot of time [and] energy that’s put into the process of preparing for each and every game, let alone the season. I like the way our staff works, and I like the way they work with our players.

"

On Sunday morning, Fox Sports' Jay Glazer reported that McCarthy was singing a different tune.

The head coach went out of his way to clarify that his decision to resume the responsibility of calling plays "wasn't easy" to make.

"The decision was made because I feel as the leader of this football team, I've got to make sure I maximize all the opportunities and resources to (save) and to give our team the chance to win," McCarthy said after the win over the Cowboys, per Weston Hodkiewicz of Press-Gazette Media.

"Personally, it didn't feel very good, it didn’t feel good at all. That's a challenge with these types of decisions, but professionally it was what I felt I needed to do."

McCarthy was making suggestions to Clements about play selection. Now, the two will switch places, with Clements making suggestions from the coaches' box and McCarthy calling the plays on the sideline.

Will McCarthy's reclaiming of play-calling duties be a magic fix for all that has ailed the Packers offensively this year? Certainly not.

But it's a huge step in the right direction.

The biggest takeaway from McCarthy's game plan against Dallas is that it was balanced. All told, the Packers ran 81 offensive plays—35 were passes and 44 were runs. It doesn't get much more balanced than that.

Stat	Significance
Eddie Lacy - 124 rushing yards	Season high
20 first-half rushing attempts	Season high
80% red-zone scoring percentage	2nd-highest on season
44 rushing attempts	Season high
50% third-down conversion rate	Higher than season average of 36.2%

With McCarthy at the helm, Eddie Lacy—who won his starting job back on Sunday after an excellent week of practice—flourished, turning in one of the best performances not only of his season but his young career.

Lacy rushed for 124 yards on 24 carries and found the end zone once, averaging 5.2 yards per attempt.

James Starks also scored a touchdown and added another 71 yards as a change-of-pace back.

That commitment to the run game, sometimes lacking in Clements' play selection, opened up the field for Aaron Rodgers and allowed him to do some things in the passing game that have been lacking this season.

That included getting Randall Cobb involved early and often.

From watching his struggles this season as he has been forced to step into the role of No. 1 receiver in Jordy Nelson's absence, it would be justified to conclude that Cobb is simply best in a complementary role, unable to handle the pressures of being a top target.

However, that didn't appear to be the case on Sunday, as McCarthy orchestrated and Rodgers executed a game plan that allowed Cobb to gain 81 yards on eight receptions.

McCarthy moved Cobb around the field, using him in the slot when it exploited the Cowboys defense and moving him into the backfield, where he ran the ball three times but was also useful when Rodgers used play action and then went elsewhere with the ball.

Cobb's cohorts, Davante Adams and James Jones, have turned in wildly inconsistent performances this season and have both struggled with their share of drops.

But McCarthy helped enable them to find success through his creative and dynamic play selection.

"Instead of consistently spreading both receivers wide in static 2x2 or 3x1 sets, McCarthy diversified his formations, even putting his wideouts in some stack alignments in order to compromise the spacing of Dallas’s cornerbacks," Andy Benoit of the MMQB observed.

"This is the wrinkle that’s been so badly missing from Green Bay’s attack."

Indeed it is.

McCarthy's creativity, knowledge of how to best use his personnel and ability to stack plays for a game plan that builds upon itself could be a major boon to the Packers offense as it attempts to reshape itself late in the season for what the team hopes will be a playoff run into February.