*The Green Bay Packers entire coaching staff is in Hawaii this week to coach the NFC squad in the Pro Bowl. Including Head Coach Mike McCarthy, only four members of the coaching staff have coached at the Pro Bowl before.
Among those new to the experience is offensive coordinator Joe Philbin, and he is chronicling some of the happenings in Honolulu in this Packers.com diary. Here is the second installment:*
The weather has been great. On Thursday, we went to the Dole plantation, and we went to the North Shore to watch surfing. Today we're going to go snorkeling at a bay about a half-hour away from here. It's supposed to be the best on the island.
My boys actually went fishing yesterday with Matt Birk, because he's a kid I coached at Harvard 10 years ago. They caught us some fish for dinner. They actually brought it back and the chefs served it up for us. The boys caught enough for everybody and we had some leftover too. They caught about 17 tunas and a couple mahi-mahis, so that was fun.
They've got this nice beautiful lagoon here, so a lot of us have been hanging around there. Aaron Kampman's got his kids and his wife and his parents here. Al Harris has been down at the beach, and Chad Clifton and Donald Driver. You see all the guys at the pool or the beach, and you try to balance the sight-seeing, getting off the hotel grounds, and also just relaxing around here.
We had a nice dinner Tuesday night. Everybody in the Packer organization got together for dinner, which was an excellent meal and a lot of fun. Just being around everybody, all the families, all the kids. Then we went to a luau on Wednesday night that the NFL put on. I even got a tattoo, a tribal one they draw right on you. It took up most of my forearm. We also threw spears over at the luau, a lot of fun stuff. It was a good time.
The snorkeling today might be our last off-site trip that we take. We may go into downtown Honolulu to shop a little bit on Saturday, but with all the teenagers, they don't like to do that a whole lot. There's so much to do, and the area is so beautiful, we've had a great time.
At practice the guys have been real business-like about it. We've gotten a lot of work done in a short period of time, and it seems like they've picked up what we're going to be doing schematically quickly as well.
It's interesting because you get a chance to talk to different guys about how they do things. The offensive linemen from Minnesota, like Steve Hutchinson and Matt Birk, we've talked to them about techniques. With the quarterbacks, we talk about different plays that they've run out of different formations. Tony Romo will ask questions, or Matt Hasselbeck. He was in this system years ago in Green Bay, so he's kind of interested to see how the system has evolved a little bit, and some of the differences. We kind of pick their brain as well, and you have good give-and-take with these guys.
We've got enough weapons, so we ought to be able to move the ball and score some points. We've got a great group of guys here, and we want to get everybody involved. Virtually all these guys can make some plays, so we want to get the ball in their hands, get everybody some touches. We'll roll guys through a lot and let them all contribute, and we're looking forward to a team victory on Sunday.
