Surprise! Free agency has been good for Green Bay

GREEN BAY, WIS. -- The words hadn't even left my lips completely when Packers cornerback Al Harris began to smile, nod and answer.

The question, in its entirety, was supposed to be, "Is Green Bay's style of bump-and-run coverage a dying art in the NFL?"

"It's dead, dawg," Harris said Thursday as the Packers continued preparing for Sunday's NFC Championship Game against the visiting Giants. "If you're looking for bump-and-run coverage, you either got to go to Green Bay or Oakland. Some teams may do it here or there, but our base defense is bump and run. We're the last of a dying breed."

The Packers play it because, well, they're one of the few teams that can do it and not get clobbered consistently. In fact, with Harris on one side and Charles Woodson on the other, the Packers are the NFL's best bump-and-run team.

It's a philosophy that helped them rank No. 2 in opponents' completion percentage (55.2) and No. 3 in third-down conversions allowed (33 percent) this season.

Packers coach Mike McCarthy is an offensive-minded coach. But the former Chiefs assistant fell in love with the bump-and-run style while watching Kansas City's offense face the likes of Dale Carter, Kevin Ross and Albert Lewis during the mid-1990s.

"I knew that was the defense I wanted if I became a head coach," McCarthy said. "Fortunately, [Packers defensive coordinator] Bob Sanders already had that in place when I came here [in 2006]."

"I think there's two different styles of play," McCarthy said. "One is outside leverage, keep it in front of you, react to the football. The other is to get inside of [the receiver] and beat him up and challenge him. We're definitely inside of them and beating them up and challenging them at the line of scrimmage."

Again, the Packers do this because, well, they can. And the reason they can is they have two bonafide bump-and-run cover corners. And the reason they have two of them is because free agency, which was supposed to be the enemy of the Packers when it began 15 years ago, has been kind to them one more time.

In 1993, when unrestricted free agency began, the Packers immediately landed the founding father of free agency, Reggie White. The late defensive end led the Packers to a Super Bowl championship at the end of the 1996 season and is in the Hall of Fame.

Since then, the Packers have built themselves mostly through the draft while supplementing their roster with free agents. In 1996, they picked up Desmond Howard from Jacksonville. All he did was become Super Bowl XXXI MVP.

Ten years later, they signed Woodson, the former Heisman Trophy winner, who was nearing 30 and coming off a second broken leg the year before in Oakland. Most NFL teams thought Woodson was finished. But the Packers offered him a seven-year deal worth $10.5 million in the first year.

Woodson laughs about it now. He loves Green Bay, and his career has been resurrected on a team that's one game from the Super Bowl. But let's just say his original scouting report on Green Bay wasn't glowing.

"The talk is always this is no place for a black man," Woodson said. "You get all those reports from people who have played here, and those were going through my mind when Green Bay kept calling. ... But my story of Green Bay, the people, would be a little different than what was told to me."

While the Packers haven't built their success via free agency, it is worth noting that they have the NFL's best regular-season record since 1993 (152-88). The second-best mark belongs to New England (150-90), which, by the way, also is favored to win a conference title game at home on Sunday and advance to Super Bowl XLII.