McCarthy gave a snapshot of it when he walked into the huddle during a TV timeout with his team trailing by 11 points, looked at his teammates and delivered a quote that is destined to get printed on T-shirts: “Is there any place else you guys would rather be?”
“A smile goes a long way,” he said. “There were a lot of smiles after I said that. Just a little bit of a perspective shift. Yeah, things weren’t going our way, but we’re here doing this together.”
The snowball was gaining steam at that point. McCarthy made clutch plays to engineer a spirited comeback. Emotions poured out of him, resulting in emotions pouring out of his teammates and coaches.
His debut was a wild ride. The young quarterback remained undeterred by all of it. In his words, that’s how he rolls.