There is something to be said about sustaining success in the NFL, a league designed at every turn to help the underachievers and promote widespread parity. As a result, the margin between good and bad is razor thin, which is why teams in last place one year so often make the playoffs the next year.

Mike McCarthy’s Green Bay Packers almost always fell on the right side of the ledger. Until the last two seasons, which were wrecked by the collarbone injury to Aaron Rodgers and a tidal wave of missed opportunities and mistakes, McCarthy’s teams made the playoffs nine times in 11 tries, including an unblemished eight-year run of qualifying for the postseason every season between 2009-16.

The Packers fired McCarthy Sunday, 12 games into a lost season, ending a 13-year run that began with a drubbing from the Chicago Bears at home to start 2006 and ended with a drubbing from the Arizona Cardinals at home Sunday.

McCarthy leaves behind a tangled, complicated legacy, weaved together by 135 total wins, the ultimate victory in Super Bowl XLV and so many heartbreaks and near-misses.

His teams were always good.

Eight times, McCarthy’s Packers won 10 or more games. He captured six division titles. He won 10 playoff games and made four NFC title games. Before 2017, he had just one losing season. His career win percentage over 204 games is 61.8, making him one of only 14 men in NFL history to coach over 200 games and still win over 60 percent of games.

McCarthy revived the career of Brett Favre, developed the skill set of Aaron Rodgers and expertly navigated the changeover, bouncing back from being one play away from the Super Bowl with Favre in 2007 to winning it all with Rodgers three short years later.

No one can take the Super Bowl title away from McCarthy. He brought the Lombardi Trophy back to Green Bay for the first time in almost 14 years. He’ll forever be a Super Bowl-winning head coach, an immortal title so few in the history of the game can claim, even in a place called Titletown.

McCarthy never got back to the Super Bowl, another defining feature of his legacy.

His teams, while always good, were too rarely great.

Even in 2010, the Packers had to endure a 3-3 start and get some help late to sneak into the playoffs as the wild card. A year later, they dealt with the inverse scenario, going supernova during a 15-1 regular season only to flame out in the divisional round, losing by 17 points at Lambeau Field to the visiting Giants. The Packers were never the No. 1 seed in the NFC again, a fact that severely hindered McCarthy’s teams from getting back to the Super Bowl.

Rodgers has never played an NFC title game at home. Of his 16 playoff starts, only five were played at Lambeau Field. That’s incredible.

Over McCarthy’s final six trips to the playoffs, the Packers were 5-6. They were beaten soundly by Colin Kaepernick and the San Francisco 49ers in 2013. A year later, they lost to Kaepernick and the 49ers at home, ending a season that needed a miracle play on fourth down in Chicago in Week 17 to finish 8-7-1 and win the NFC North.

The Packers were Super Bowl-quality in 2014. No doubt about it. Flip even one missed opportunity in the NFC title game in Seattle Green Bay’s way and the Packers play the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLIX. The collapse forever altered McCarthy’s legacy and reset the course of the franchise. His last great team couldn’t close the deal.

The failure felt like an anchor weighing down the next two seasons.

The Packers started 6-0 in 2015 but limped to the finish line, losing six of their final 10 regular-season games and eventually falling in overtime to the Arizona Cardinals in the divisional round.

Another mini supernova saved the 4-6 Packers in 2016, and there’s no discounting McCarthy’s final playoff win, a dramatic, last-second victory over the top-seeded Cowboys in Dallas. But his undermanned team was blown out of the water a week later in Atlanta, providing a merciless end to a team that never looked good enough to play in a Super Bowl.

The 2016 team now feels a little bit like a microcosm of the McCarthy’s tenure. The Packers recovered during the regular season, got hot at the right time but just weren’t good enough when it counted most to get over the finish line.

Who knows where the 2017 Packers were headed before Rodgers’ injury. McCarthy’s inability to develop Brett Hundley as a backup exposed another deeply flawed roster and made Rodgers’ return anticlimactic. This season, a team in transition couldn’t stop making critical errors late in games and never found a galvanizing moment.

History will be kind to McCarthy. He established a culture of winning in Green Bay and then won consistently, despite all the factors in the league working against winning consistently. During that franchise-altering summer of 2008, he confidently stood by Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback he developed for three years, ushering an NFL legend out the door and winning a Super Bowl for his efforts. The guess here is that most will eventually remember McCarthy as the man who helped create Aaron Rodgers, not the man who wasted Aaron Rodgers.

Brett Favre only won one Super Bowl. He threw away a Super Bowl appearance in 2007, tried to torpedo the franchise in 2008 and then engineered his way to Minnesota in 2010 strictly out of revenge, and not even 10 years later, he’s already worshipped again by the fan base.

If McCarthy’s biggest blunder was not winning a second Super Bowl, which has been done by only 13 NFL coaches in history, his lasting legacy will also be spared.

McCarthy’s legacy should be defined by both his triumphs and his failures. Both were done in spectacular fashion over his 13 seasons as the Packers head coach, a job title and responsibility he cherished and appreciated more than anyone. The franchise and city couldn’t have asked for a better ambassador.

No, McCarthy did not fill a 14th picture frame with champions inside Lambeau Field. But his legacy will always include filling the 13th frame with the faces of the 2010 team, and he always put the Packers organization in position to fill the 14th, even if his teams weren’t great enough after Super Bowl XLV to finish the job.