You remember Mike Sherman, right? The biggest-hipped coach Green Bay ever saw? He had the luxury of coaching Brett Favre, which seemingly made it easy to get 10-12 wins per year.
One year into his coaching career, the legendary Ron Wolf unexpectedly retired as GM and Sherman was given those duties as well.
Sherman failed.
Miserably.
I don’t have the time or desire to revisit all his awful GM decisions. Feel free to google them for yourself, but I don’t expect any arguments.
As a coach, however, he may not have been so bad. They were successful during his run, but it was hard to tell if that was because he was a good coach or if it was because of Brett Favre. He had a total record of 57-39, which makes him, statistically, the 5th best Packers coach ever – actually, he’s (statistically) the best of all the Packers coaches who never won a championship.
Trying to GM as well as coach was obviously too much for him and he was stripped of his GM duties after the 2004 season, leaving his successor (Ted Thompson) a massive talent deficit and a payroll that was larger than the salary cap (but everyone still wanted Ted to sign Wahle and Rivera, the two highest-paid guards in the game). Sherman was then relieved of employment with the Packers altogether after a 4-12 season in 2005.
From there, he went to coach at Texas A&M, possibly as a favor for foolishly drafting so many of their players over the years. In his tenure there, he went 25-25 before being fired.
Continuing his downward movement, he then went on to coach Nauset Regional High School in Eastham, Massachusetts near his hometown of Norwood, Massachusetts.
Over two years, he had a record of 4-18 and, in case you’re new to math or football, that sucks (but not as bad as Colin Kaepernick).
On Saturday, he resigned (mercifully).
Total failure. There is no longer any doubt that his success with the Packers was solely based on the players that Ron Wolf assembled for him, most notably Brett Favre.
He left Green Bay far worse off from a talent and salary cap perspective, but we now know that he was (and still is) also a terrible coach. Statistics aside, let’s rank him somewhere next to Scooter McLean (on either side you like) in team lore.
As he keeps sliding his way down the food chain, failure after failure, maybe he’ll make his way down to Pop Warner and I can square off against him.
I would so win.