The Green Bay Packers fired longtime coach Mike McCarthy after the team’s loss to the Arizona Cardinals in Week 13, citing the stunning defeat at Lambeau Field and the desire to get a head start on the coaching search as leading reasons for the decision.

One former team executive believes a more important reason might have contributed to Mark Murphy’s decision to fire McCarthy during the season.

Andrew Brandt, the former Packers vice president who now writes for Sports Illustrated, thinks Murphy already has a coaching candidate in mind, and the candidate likely doesn’t work inside the NFL.

“My sense is that the Packers have their eye on a candidate that they wanted to contact now, someone not currently working for an NFL team, rather than having to wait until January,” Brandt wrote.

Firing McCarthy during the season would allow Murphy to approach an outside candidate immediately, before other NFL teams with potential openings, and without doing it behind McCarthy’s back.

“Absent a candidate outside the league, why make this move now to simply interview NFL candidates under contract until after the season?” Brandt explained. “I believe they did not want to reach out to a candidate while Mike had the position.”

Teams can’t have direct conversations with candidates working for another NFL team until after the regular season. However, a candidate not in the NFL is fair game.

Brandt didn’t specifically mention any potential candidates, but it stands to reason top college coaching candidates such as Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley, Northwestern’s Pat Fitzgerald, Stanford’s David Shaw and Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly could be of interest to Murphy’s search.

It will be interesting to see how the Packers’ coaching search evolves over time. From Brandt’s perspective, understanding the origin is important. Was the loss to the Cardinals truly the final straw for McCarthy, or did Murphy use it as an opportunity to start working on a candidate not currently in the NFL?