McCarthy’s Future in Dallas Hangs in Balance: Should the Cowboys Bring Him Back or Cut Ties
The Dallas Cowboys have won three of their last four games, heading into their Week 16 Sunday night game against the Buccaneers, and because they are perhaps the most results-over-process organization in the NFL, there has accordingly been a groundswell of chatter about head coach Mike McCarthy returning next season. That would not be a good idea.
McCarthy was hired in 2020 and given a very simple, very low bar to clear: Do better than Jason Garrett, who in a decade as the Cowboys’ head coach failed to get the team beyond the divisional round of the playoffs and indeed won only two playoff games. McCarthy has not cleared that bar. Dallas has still yet to make an NFC title game, by the end of this season will have won only one playoff game in five years (the same rate as Garrett), and has indeed been utterly embarrassed in all three of its playoff losses — each somehow worse than the last.
After the second consecutive embarrassing playoff loss to the 49ers, McCarthy parted ways with then-offensive coordinator Kellen Moore and took over the play-calling responsibility himself. Many point to the season-long results in 2023, wherein the Cowboys finished fifth in yards and first in points and Dak Prescott was a second-team All-Pro who finished second in MVP voting, and declare him a success.
Such a formulation ignores the fact that McCarthy’s plan coming into the season was so bad that it took CeeDee Lamb throwing a public tantrum for Dallas to shift away from a run-heavy, short-passing, ball-control attack to what was quite obviously the team’s best path: turning the offense over to Prescott and Lamb and letting them go to work. Only after doing that did the Cowboys start to take off. Pivoting in a new direction is admirable, and worthy of praise. Having an initial plan that is so unsuccessful that your best offensive player has to publicly call it out to get you to swing in a different direction, is worthy instead of criticism.
Even after making the pivot, it’s not like McCarthy was scheming his offense into position for success. Despite their much-publicized shift to what Prescott called the “Texas Coast” offense (a fusion of McCarthy’s West Coast principles with the offense the team had run under Moore), the Cowboys were still among the league leaders in stagnant formations and stagnant route concepts. Prescott had the sixth-highest tight-window throw rate out of 45 qualified quarterbacks, according to NFL.com’s Next Gen Stats. It was only by virtue of his outperforming his expected completion percentage by 4.7% that the Cowboys were able to succeed with that offense.
They counted more on the players to beat the defense, than on giving them advantages through scheme. The system was essentially, “Dak and CeeDee, go be superheroes.” When they actually did that, things worked great. (At least until the playoffs. More on that in a second.) But when they came into this season with the exact same plan — despite having downgraded across the offensive line, which would obviously make enacting said plan considerably more difficult — and Prescott was unable to outperform his surroundings at the same level, the offense was considerably below average.
Given that McCarthy is a play-calling offensive head coach, his major selling point should be an ability to get more than expected out of the talent on hand. For the most part, he hasn’t done that — and especially not in big games. The offense has disappointed in a major way in crucial moments, including earlier this season in losses to the Ravens, Lions, 49ers and Falcons, prior to Prescott’s season-ending injury. And that’s before we get to the three playoff losses to the 49ers and Packers, which were characterized by tremendous offensive failings. (The pre-garbage time offensive ineptitude in last year’s loss to Green Bay was overshadowed by the abominable defensive performance.)
