GREEN BAY — Growing up in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, with a7 1/2-year age difference, that gap meant a lot of things for Matt and Mike LaFleur.

It meant big brother Matt would tease his little bro, and Mike, by his own admission, would play the role of “annoying little brother” to the hilt. It meant they’d compete to be in the good graces of their parents, Kristi and Denny, a tradition that continued even into adulthood. And it meant that Mike was still a grade-schooler when Matt went off to college.

It also meant that they came from different video game generations.

Matt started playing Nintendo’s Tecmo Bowl when it came out in 1987, the year Mike was born — meaning he was Player 1 and his opponent was always the computer 

But when EA Sports came out with NCAA College Football in 1993 for Sega Genesis — it was originally called Bill Walsh College Football, named after the legendary San Francisco 49ers head coach and the coach most closely identified with the famed West Coast Offense — the LaFleur brothers had their game. One would play as Central Michigan, in honor of Denny, who was an assistant on the Chippewas’ staff at the time, while the other would play as Notre Dame or Florida State.

Those matchups proved to be a digital training ground for their future NFL coaching careers. And while they have both coached together and against one another during their shared time in the league, everything about their brother-versus-brother dynamic changed on Sunday, when the Arizona Cardinals hired Mike as their new head coach — as Matt turns his attention to his eighth season as the Green Bay Packers head coach.

The LaFleur Bros. become the third set of brothers in the modern NFL era to simultaneously be head coaches and are the second brother act heading into the 2026 season, joining the New York Giants’ John Harbaugh and the Los Angeles Chargers’ Jim Harbaugh. John and Jim faced off earlier in their careers when John was coaching the Baltimore Ravens and Jim coached the San Francisco 49ers.

Before the Harbaughs and the LaFleurs, brothers Jon (Oakland/Las Vegas) and Jay Gruden (Washington) were head coaches in 2018 and 2019.

Cardinals owner Michael Bidwell announced Mike’s hiring in a statement Sunday. He replaces Jonathan Gannon, whom the Cardinals fired after their 3-14 finish in 2025. Gannon, whose teams went a combined 15-36 in his three seasons in Arizona, is now the Packers’ new defensive coordinator.

The 38-year-old younger LaFleur spent the past three seasons as the Los Angeles Rams offensive coordinator — the same job his older brother held in 2017 under head coach Sean McVay.

“I couldn’t be more fired up to become the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals and am beyond grateful to Michael and [general manager] Monti [Ossenfort] for this opportunity,” Mike said in a statement. “Having competed against them in the NFC so many times in recent years, I know the type of talent and toughness the team has and cannot wait to get to Arizona to hit the ground running.”

The Packers beat the Cardinals, 27-23, back on Oct. 19 at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., but the two teams won’t face each other in 2026 — unless they meet in the playoffs.

According to the NFL’s scheduling rotation, though, the Packers and Cardinals are set to face each other in Arizona in 2027 — for what will surely be deemed “The LaFleur Bowl.”

But that game will actually mark the ninth time that the LaFleurs, who were together on the Atlanta Falcons’ coaching staff in 2015 and 2016, will have gone head-to-head in the NFL — having split their first eight meetings.

The first time they faced each other was in 2017, when Matt was the Rams’ offensive coordinator under McVay and Mike was the 49ers’ wide receivers coach and passing-game coordinator. They split their two head-to-head NFC West matchups that year.

They again met twice in 2019, Matt’s first year as the Packers’ head coach, with Mike’s 49ers winning both in the regular-season matchup and in the NFC Championship Game.

Matt’s Packers did beat Mike’s 49ers in the 2020 regular season, but when Mike took the Jets’ offensive coordinator job under Robert Saleh in 2021, the brothers didn’t face off again until 2022, when the Jets came to Lambeau Field and smashed the Packers, 27-10.

Since then, Matt has won back-to-back regular-season games against the Rams and Mike in 2023 and 2024.

Of course, had Matt had his way when he first got the Packers job in 2019, he and Mike would have been working together. Mike, who was with the 49ers at the time, was his first choice for offensive coordinator, but Niners head coach Kyle Shanahan blocked the move.

During a conference with Wisconsin-based reporters midway through the 2019 season before a Packers-49ers prime-time matchup, Shanahan made no apologies for preventing the family reunion from happening, although he admitted he might’ve relented if Matt had gotten desperate.

“It was very easy [to block it], and I looked forward to saying ‘no’ very quickly,” Shanahan said. “I mean, and I get the family stuff and everything, and I’m sure if things got pretty rough for awhile [as LaFleur tried to fill out his coaching staff], eventually I would’ve softened up and given in — maybe.”

And while Matt never ruled out the possibility of working with Mike again on the same staff someday — “That’s not something we really talk about, but a lot of craziness happens in our business,” he said — it looks like there’ll be more head-to-head matchups between the two moving forward.

With more opportunities for Mike to be annoying.

“There’s plenty of stories out there about how annoying I was toward him,” Mike said in 2023. “Usually, I was not the one getting in trouble because I was the younger brother. But I looked up to him like crazy, right? Especially as I just kind of got more involved with sports and my love for sports.

“So, I was annoying with him, but we’re pretty tight.”

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