Mike McCarthy, the owner's latest monkey in the middle, is getting a raw deal
What a circus in Cowboys Country. The head coach knew it was different here, but no way did he think it'd be this bad. Jerry Jones' latest ramblings expose all the flaws.
There’s a street named after him in Green Bay, Wisc., and his legacy’s forever cemented in Packers lore next to the luminaries: Lambeau, Lombardi and Holmgren. Years from now, it’s the 125 wins and Super Bowl title most will hold dear.
Yet, remember how Mike McCarthy’s tenure as the Green Bay Packers head coach ended in 2018. It was ugly.
Any remnants of belief Aaron Rodgers had in his longtime coach were gone. The quarterback never fully respected the coach who passed on him for Alex Smith as the 49ers’ OC in 2005 and many of the QB’s backers in the locker room believed he had the right to railroad his coach’s calls. This relationship soured beyond repair, and the X’s and O’s appeared to pass McCarthy by as the likes of Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan innovated the offensive football. I covered all sides of this messy split at Bleacher Report and, yes, multiple sources said McCarthy skipped offensive meetings for massages.
He appeared checked out. It pissed off Rodgers. A perennial contender rotted from within.
“If you’re not a part of meetings, and then you’re trying to be pissed about execution, nobody’s going to really respect you,” one former front-office member from the McCarthy-Rodgers era told me then. “They’re going to look at you like, ‘Where have you been all week?’ It sounded like he was really just chilling.”
After a one-year hiatus, he got a job.
The Dallas Cowboys named McCarthy their ninth head coach in team history. He inherited a solid roster with a franchise quarterback and strung together three straight 12-win seasons. But since each of those seasons ended in playoff failure, here he is. Back on the hot seat. Back to coaching for his job. There’s some merit to it. Dallas has wasted away three legitimate opportunities at a Super Bowl ring and his game management is often puzzling. (To put it kindly.)
But the more we learn about the state of the Cowboys, the more I can’t help but empathize for the coach stuck in the muck.
He has quietly proven he can adapt. He’s not the problem in the Dallas.
Yet here’s Dallas, again, dangerously close to eating up and spitting out another shot at a ring.
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If Jerry Jones would’ve canned McCarthy after the Cowboys’ rancid 48-32 wild-card loss to the Packers, few would’ve batted an eye. That’d at least hint at a coherent direction. After all, he’s the owner preaching about “glory holes.” If the aging 81-year-old truly was obsessed with winning another Super Bowl, installing a new coach to work with this collection of talent is logical. But that’s the problem. Logic need not apply here. He’ll never empower a head coach to run his entire operation. Instead, we get more meandering press conferences from both Jerry and Stephen Jones with McCarthy barely saying a word in the middle.
As the three men sat at a table to preview training camp, it was obvious — again — that the Cowboys will fall short in 2024.
For a team with so much talent, that’s nuts. Hope shouldn’t feel lost. Dallas finished last season first in points scored and fifth in yards with their quarterback squarely in his prime.
But it’s no coincidence that the only two teams in the NFC that have failed to reach the conference championship since 1995 are Dallas and Washington. Bad ownership finds a way to poison the final product. Because if you’re going to keep McCarthy out of that Packers loss, as one former Cowboys exec explained, at least tack a year onto his deal. Instead, he’s a lame duck. He’s the date worried about one speck of food getting caught between his teeth.
All while the richest franchise in sports manages to botch contract negotiations with their three best players.
Dallas could’ve inked Prescott long term ahead of the offseason wave, gotten his 2024 number down, signed veterans not named “Zeke” capable of closing that 49ers gap and then re-signed CeeDee Lamb and/or Micah Parsons to win both in the present and the future. This is a franchise that should have smelled blood over the offseason. One more offensive weapon, one more key defensive addition and the Cowboys are in position to make a run at the Super Bowl.
Instead, we’re one day from August and none of the team’s three best players are signed. Stephen Jones despises dead money.
No wonder the coach is fed up. One source who’s plugged into the Cowboys indicated to me that McCarthy wouldn’t have even taken the job if he knew it’d be like this.
Naturally, my response was something down the lines of, Uhh… has Mike seen what’s happened to Cowboys coaches past? Since the Bill Parcells split in 2007, this is an owner determined to hire coaches he can control. Jones would rather lose his way, than win someone else’s way. It felt hollow when Parcells turned his team around.
As this source said, it’s human nature for all of us to see the good in a situation.
McCarthy wanted a job — obviously — but McCarthy also believed he could make this partnership work. It hasn’t. Regardless of who they pay and when, it’s hard to imagine the Cowboys sticking together from August until February. McCarthy probably needs to reach the NFC title game to keep his job. And yet, due to his boss’ poor negotiating tactics, he’ll be coaching a team that didn’t get any better all offseason.
Everyone is feeling good in July. This is the honeymoon period for all teams.
In Oxnard, Calif., there’s simmering tensions.
When asked about Jones saying he expects the quarterback to be a Cowboy beyond ‘24, Prescott channeled Marshawn: “I’m just here so I don’t get fined.” He then told NFL Network that he’s seen other great quarterbacks play for other teams. “That may be a reality for me one day,” Prescott added. “It may not be my decision."
If the Cowboys do not believe Prescott is the answer, fine. Trade him. Chart a new plan.
Instead, they’ve continued to say nice things publicly while sitting on their hands privately. For months. On Tuesday, Stephen Jones told 94.1 San Antonio that he’s confident a deal will get done, adding: “We don’t picture Dak in another uniform at all. We do believe that the worm is gonna turn and he’s gonna win a championship for us.”
Unfortunately for the Jones gang, Prescott now has complete leverage and just may be in zero rush to sign anything.
Playoff criticism is fair. He is 2-5 in the postseason with 14 touchdowns, seven picks and a 91.8 rating.
He’s also a quarterback fresh off a career season: 4,516 yards, 36 touchdowns and only nine interceptions. If the MVP voting wasn’t such a lazy monolithic enterprise, Prescott and Buffalo’s Josh Allen would’ve garnered more than one combined first-place vote. He was that sharp during the regular season for the Cowboys, and he’s got a quick-trigger playing style that’ll age just fine over the next 5 to 7 years. Anyone with a realistic case to make as a top-10 quarterback will make as much or more than the QB before him. What’s the alternative in Jacksonville? Miami? Green Bay?
Paying Prescott market price shouldn’t be much of a debate.
Long ago, the Cowboys could’ve realistically gotten this deal done just north of $53 million per year.
Now, Prescott shouldn’t sign anything less than $60 million per year. Don’t be surprised if he goes full 2017 Kirk Cousins and bets on himself in 2024.
What a horrendous lack of foresight by Jerry and Stephen.
Even though it was Paxton Lynch who Jerry Jones wanted in that 2016 NFL Draft, the modern Cowboys have done a fine job of finding talent. Knowing when to show the money is the mystery. They’ve been here before with Prescott, too. He played on the final year of his rookie deal in ‘19, then again on the franchise tag in ‘20. Jones took glee in pointing out to reporters that guard Zack Martin — like Lamb this summer — held out one year ago, and got paid. That doesn’t make it right.
All a shame, too. McCarthy has adjusted to the modern game as both a play designer and playcaller. He and Prescott have a good thing going. Nor has he been checked out as the Cowboys’ coach. After firing Kellen Moore as his OC, McCarthy found answers last season. Once Dallas decided to stick with him in January, all ambiguity should’ve been eliminated from the building. All in means believing in your core.
Jones doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of the words he uses.
After citing the 12 All-Pros on the roster, calling this “an outstanding team,” he cited all of the unknown as a positive.
“We’ve got a lot of ambiguity in the team,” Jones said. “I have ambiguity everywhere in the things that I look at and do. Maybe the best thing that God gave me was a tolerance for ambiguity. That’s what you have, that’s what frustrates you. And in frustrating you, obviously it frustrates fans, to not have closure or to not have bright lines. That’s not in my mind, that’s not in my life.”
Most questions were directed at the Joneses.
Nothing inspired much confidence.
Asked why fans should be excited about the future with so much in the balance, Jones said he’s more concerned about winning the award at the end of the season than having his house in order for training camp. He sounded pleased and satisfied with an offseason that completely got away from him. Patience should not have been a virtue for this team at this time. As he rambled on about hovering near the “rim,” Jones was oblivious to the fact that the Cowboys had every opportunity at a tomahawk dunk.
Jones repeated that he takes “a lot of solace” in the team’s three 12-win seasons. To him, that’s a sign that Dallas will be in the playoffs again.
If the goal was to put the concerns of Cowboys fans at ease, Jones achieved the exact opposite.
He was less Owner/President/GM and more confused elder.
“I’m all-in. I’m all-in. Sometimes, being all-in means you narrow,” said Jones, holding his hands close together, “you remove the months out here that are in the future and you narrow it down into all we’re talking about is right now and the next playoff season. And that’s it for everybody. We’re all-in. We’re all-in. It’s all right there. Let’s... let’s… OK? We’ve all got some things out here in the future, another two or three years on contracts, all that stuff. Let’s all get in here. Zero right now in this. Dak’s got his year, his contract, let’s focus right here. We’ve all got a lot on the line for that playoff game. A lot of it.”
Huh?
After a breath, came the word salad that topped them all, ripe with a pat on the back to buying the team 35 years ago.
“I know that I have had a lot of mistakes in these years,” Jones said. “But the same guys making this decision that has the Cowboys — and really got there by the skin of my teeth. And it was a miracle that I was able to pull it off. A miracle. But the same imagination, the same risk-taking, the same taking risks but being pragmatic, being inconsistent, sometimes looking like you’re a Mississippi riverboat gambler and sometimes looking like you’re trying to guard the national ball. Those inconsistencies are how we got here. Now that is what you’re seeing going on right now. And I don’t know for sure if it’s going to work. But I am giving it everything I’ve got.”
Jones was one “we beat Medicare” away from this disaster of a press conference becoming something worse. His rambling diatribe does help explain why his son’s influence is clearly growing each year.
Finally, McCarthy was asked a question and he couldn’t help but sit up straight, smile and joke: “Let’s talk about football.”
It didn’t last long. Quickly, the conversation (justifiably) shifted back to the owners. Stephen proudly proclaimed that they had their highest rate of renewal in season ticket sales. “And the fastest,” Dad jumped in. “The fastest it’s ever happened in the league.” Winning takes a backseat to that bottom line here.
Fittingly sandwiched between the two, McCarthy took a sip of water and sat back.
If only he could say what he’d really like. This scene was a perfect microcosm for the battles McCarthy wages behind the scenes. The same battles Jason Garrett fought for 10 years as the head coach. Since the Parcells experiment, this has been an owner who prefers emasculated coaches. Over time, Garrett learned how to steer Jones the right direction. He’d make Jones feel like smart decisions were his idea all along.
Now, McCarthy is living in Jerry’s World.
Given his own playoff problems, it’s hard to imagine. But he’s (by far) the most competent of the people in charge. Mike McCarthy is this team’s best hope of winning in 2024.
Who’s even around past then? That’s anyone’s guess.
Either way, I doubt Jerry Jones will be naming any streets after any coaches at The Star in Frisco.
From the offseason:
Jerry’s World series:
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Didn't think McCarthy has been a problem with the Cowboys, he has a few...interesting clock decisions, but they also get blown up 80X because they're the Cowboys and ESPN's talking head shows cover them like paparazzi. Honestly, though, wouldn't be shocked if McCarthy is back again next year even without an NFC Championship game appearance. Garrett kept coming back, and back, and back. If anything, wouldn't be shocked if McCarthy resigned from Dallas first.
Hard to really feel sorry for Mike though, he’s a very, very wealthy man and has had a pretty great career coaching wise all things considered. I honestly don’t fault the Cowboys with how they’ve handled the Dak negotiations-he’s not an elite QB and has never played well when it counts the most. The fact that they aren’t getting deals done with Lamb and Parsons is very dumb-both are without question two of the very best in the league at their positions. I don’t get it.