Having an owner in the building may be good for Mike McCarthy

[Rowdy]

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Whenever the question of the Packers not having a single owner comes up, some react by saying, “It could be worse. They could have Jerry Jones.”

Mike McCarthy will be uniquely qualified to compare the two experiences.

In the latter years of his Green Bay tenure, McCarthy received criticism for letting a sense of complacency creep into the organization. When, for example, quarterback Aaron Rodgers complained publicly about a lack of energy on the sidelines and a healthy fear that players who don’t do their jobs won’t have jobs, McCarthy was the clear target of those remarks. (Even if Rodgers didn’t appreciate the fact that some in the media were connecting fairly obvious darts.)

After the Packers fired McCarthy, CEO Mark Murphy admitted that, indeed, “a complacency had set in among some players and coaches.”

Like plenty of teams, the Packers don’t have an owner in the building on a regular basis. Unlike every other team, they don’t have an owner at all, in the classic sense. It’s a corporate structure, with no one person having the power at any given moment to fire, hire, whatever if there’s something happening that the owner doesn’t like.

The lack of immediate, bright-line accountability can, over time, make people more comfortable than they should be, especially when competing with 31 franchises who are coached by men who live and work under the cloud of someone who can, at any given time, catch a wild hair and decide to make changes. McCarthy now has that dynamic, and to the extent that success made him satisfied in Green Bay, the presence of Jerry and Stephen Jones may keep that from happening in Dallas.

They also will provide McCarthy plenty of media cover, allowing him to go about his business while they do radio interviews and press conferences and otherwise reduce the external demands on McCarthy’s time. And if they meddle, well, that still may be better than working with a G.M. who provided help primarily (and in some years exclusively) through the draft.