Packers coach Mike McCarthy said in April that it feels like his first offseason with the team rather than his 13th as the team has hired new coordinators on both sides of the ball.
On offense, McCarthy said the team went “back to Page 1 in the playbook” but it sounds like the differences from past seasons are going to be less dramatic. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers said it is not “wholesale change” and offensive coordinator Joe Philbin also said the alterations have stopped short of creating something different.
“As I said to them in the first meeting we had on April 16, ‘If you look at historically what this offense has done in the 12 years that Mike’s been here, I think it’s third in the NFL. So that’s like in the top 10 percent of your business over a long period of time.’ So they’ve done a lot of great things here,” Philbin said, via Jason Wilde of the Wisconsin State Journal. “It’s been a process of refining, enhancing, tweaking, as opposed to, ‘Yeah we scrubbed it down.’ Yes, we went page by page. [But] we’re not starting from scratch here. These players in that locker room, they’ve done some great things.”
One big reason why the Packers aren’t starting over is Rodgers. Passing game coordinator Jim Hostler said the offense “really won’t look any different from the eye” because having Rodgers around to run it ensures that things will remain familiar even with tweaks around the edges.