Mike McCarthy isn’t the right coach for the Cowboys, and eventually Jerry Jones is going to have to realize that.
One has to wonder what Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was thinking when he hired Mike McCarthy in January of 2020.
Sure, on the surface, McCarthy was an experienced head coach and play-caller who had a Super Bowl under his belt. He was head coach of the Green Bay Packers when they won Super Bowl XLV and he was also a part of two MVP seasons for quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
On paper, bringing in a coach who won a Super Bowl while also helping produce an MVP quarterback is ideal. Jones likely saw a roster that featured a quarterback he felt could be an MVP in Dak Prescott and thought that McCarthy could replicate the success he had with the Packers. There was also the fact that in an era in which younger coaches like Sean McVay and Zac Taylor were becoming popular, McCarthy was a “throwback” to the old-school football coach of yore, being a Pittsburgh boy at heart. Perhaps that’s what drew Jones to McCarthy.
So, in theory, he made sense as head coach.
Never mind the fact that he was fired by the Packers, a notoriously conservative and slow-moving organization, after Week 13 of the 2017 season. He didn’t even get a chance to finish that season out after an uninspiring home loss to a bad Arizona Cardinals team. Never mind the fact that his record at that time was 4-7-1 and the season before that he was 7-9. Never mind the multiple times the Packers came up short in the playoffs despite arguably having the most talented team not named the New England Patriots of the decade. Remember when the Packers went 15-1 in 2011? They were the best NFL team in recent memory at that time and they didn’t even win one game in the playoffs.
That was the McCarthy experience post Super Bowl XLV, so when McCarthy was hired by Jones in 2020, the results ever since have been somewhat predictable.
Mike McCarthy’s Cowboys teams have been underwhelming
In 2021, the Cowboys fell in the Wild Card round to the San Francisco 49ers in a game in which they lost 23-17 but had the ball with a chance to win on the final drive. Prescott spiked the ball to stop the clock after it had hit zeros and the Cowboys never got a chance to try for the end zone.
In 2022, the Cowboys lost in the Divisional Round to the 49ers, 19-12. Dallas once again had the ball at the end of the game with a chance to win it but Prescott threw an eight-yard pass on third-and-10 from the Dallas 24 with no timeouts remaining. The Cowboys again didn’t have a chance to go for the endzone.
If there was any consolation for Dallas fans in 2023 it was that the game wasn’t even close. The young and upstart Packers jumped on a much more talented Cowboys team early in the Wild Card game and won, 48-32 in Dallas. Green Bay was up 27-7 at halftime.
In three playoffs in a row, McCarthy failed to help his team execute in the biggest moments.
Now? Heading into the 2024 season despite knowing that his job was likely on the line, Dallas entered Week 9 against the Atlanta Falcons with a 3-4 record and a healthy(ish) Prescott.