Mike McCarthy liked everything about not calling the Green Bay Packers' offensive plays in Thursday's preseason opener at the New England Patriots.

Except for this: Without that giant laminated play-calling card he used to carry around, he didn't know quite what to do with his hands.

"So, it looked like I didn't know what to do with my hands?" McCarthy asked after the Packers' 22-11 victory at Gillette Stadium. "That's funny. I'll work on it. I'll go look at the tape."

He even joked during a halftime interview on the Packers' TV network that he was "bored stiff."

By the time the Packers open the regular season at the Chicago Bears on Sept. 13, McCarthy plans to have a card in hand with plenty written on it.

No, that doesn't mean he's already anxious to call plays again, a job he gave up in February for the first time in his 10 years as a head coach.

All went according to McCarthy's plan during the preseason opener against the Patriots. With associate head coach Tom Clements calling the offensive plays, McCarthy was free to deal with other aspects of the sideline operation.

And he enjoyed it.

"It's totally different," McCarthy said. "I'm not competing against their defense calling plays, but it's a different role. Yeah, you do enjoy the game more. That's what a number of people were telling me beforehand. You do enjoy the game more. But it's preseason. There's a lot of things that are going on that you don't think about in a normal game."

The stress level no doubt will ramp back up at Soldier Field in a month.

So will the degree of difficulty for Clements. No one would dare criticize play calls in a preseason game, when there's little or no thought put into the game plan by either team.

All anyone had to judge Clements on was the operation, specifically how quickly he got the call into the quarterback's helmet speaker. The Packers did not have a delay-of-game penalty, although Aaron Rodgers did have to burn a pair of timeouts on his third and final series.

"Tom was very calm on the headset and he enunciated well," Rodgers said. "We had a headset issue at one point, but that's kind of the preseason. I was telling [rookie quarterback] Brett [Hundley] about my first preseason game when the headset went out, and he had one out there and was trying to get us in a good formation. But that's preseason football, and Tom did a really good job."

It sure didn't bother second-string quarterback Scott Tolzien, who had impressive performance. Tolzien completed 10-of-16 passes for 107 yards and a touchdown.

"I didn't really notice a difference," Tolzien said. "I thought everything was pretty smooth. Yeah, nothing different there. I didn't notice anything different."