Speculation continues to surround Mike McCarthy’s status as the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.
The season is over for the Dallas Cowboys. It would be nice if we could say it’s been fun, but everyone knows better. It was maddening before the season began thanks to an offseason that provided fans very little to feel good about. When it was time to play football, they struggled early, finding themselves on the wrong end of some lopsided blowouts. Then they lost Dak Prescott for the year. Any enthusiasm we had left was sucked right out of us. So, as you can see, it hasn’t been fun.
The only good thing about the 2024 season is that it’s over. We can finally turn the page and look ahead to next year, which hopefully will offer more promising results, and at the very least, a cleaner bill of health.
Before the Cowboys can move forward, they need to figure out what they want to do for a head coach. The decision on whether to bring Mike McCarthy back is not an easy one. It’s a topic that Jerry and Stephen Jones have been asked about non-stop over the last several weeks and each time they humor reporters with an answer that’s so ambiguous, it’s hard to figure out what direction they might go.
It’s quite possible the Joneses aren’t saying much because they, themselves, aren’t sure what to do. After last season, McCarthy was coming off of three consecutive 12-win seasons. He was the first coach in Cowboys history to accomplish such yet that wasn’t enough for them to reward him with a contract extension. The Joneses still had doubts.
Maybe those doubts stemmed from continuously underwhelming in the playoffs. Playing well during the regular season and then not even showing up against Green Bay will definitely put a sour taste in your mouth. The every-year frustration of another playoff letdown had to be eating at them and it created enough uncertainty that they let McCarthy play out his contract in what many believed was a “lame duck” season.
Instead of giving him a ringing endorsement in the form of a new contract, the Joneses treated 2024 like a test. Unfortunately, injuries hit the team hard and have some slapping an asterisk on the season, making it challenging to determine how well McCarthy has done. Sometimes they played hard and fought out a win, other times they looked dreadful and were taken to the woodshed. What can we conclude from all this?
The Joneses are right to have pause. Even though they have won plenty of games, when the rubber meets the road and they need good coaching, they don’t get it. As my colleague One Cool Customer has discussed – talent will win you games in the regular season, but coaching gets it done in the playoffs. The Cowboys are proof of that. They can beat teams with lesser talent, but when the postseason rolls around and they go against other teams with comparable talent, they get outcoached. And when it comes to McCarthy’s coaching, several things aren’t working for him.
Ineffective play-calling
The creativity of offensive plays has been under scrutiny during the McCarthy/Brian Schottenheimer seasons. And the plays get worse when they get into the red zone. The Cowboys finished the year with a red zone efficiency of 46%. That is second-worst in the league, trailing only the New York Giants. Even last year when Prescott was dealing and they led the league in points scored, they were still middle-of-the-road in the red zone at 58%. In contrast, the Cowboys offense was 71% in the red zone (best in the league) during Kellen Moore’s final season despite Prescott missing five games that year.
The offense also struggles to come up with good plays when they really need them. The Cowboys finished with a fourth-down percentage of 36%, the worst in the NFL. They were fifth-best during Moore’s last season. If you don’t think much of Moore as an offensive coordinator, you can’t be too pleased to see that McCarthy’s offense is worse in these important categories.
Never-ending lack of discipline
The discipline under McCarthy’s supervision has also been frequently questioned because the Cowboys have always been one of the worst teams in the league in penalties under his watch. Since 2020 when McCarthy became the head coach, no team has been penalized more than the Cowboys. That’s crazy. What’s even crazier is that Dallas has finished with the fourth-most penalties in three of the last four seasons. They’re bad and they stay bad.
Embarrassment on Sundays
Last week, we talked about how the number of blowouts the Cowboys have had under McCarthy doesn’t paint a very favorable picture. Dallas has lost five games by 20 or more points this year, the most ever in the Jerry Jones era. The team finished the year with a -6.9 average margin of victory. That is the worst mark for this team in 20 years. It’s one thing to lose games, but it’s even worse when they can’t even stay in them.
Not making the most of things
One of the most impressive things about this Cowboys season is how so many players on defense stepped up and played up to or beyond expectations. You can create a long list of contributors and even though they were decimated with injuries, this group kept fighting. Whatever the situation, this group kept making the most of things.
That didn’t happen on offense. Outside of CeeDee Lamb, the offense was mostly filled with disappointment. For reasons we might not ever understand, they didn’t allow Rico Dowdle to be the lead running back until the second half of the season, and before that, the run game was hot garbage. Once they went to Dowdle, things took off, but why did it take so long? And sometimes I forgot KaVontae Turpin was on the team. Turpin averaged 11 yards per touch, the same as Lamb, but he was severely underused. Ezekiel Elliott had almost twice as many touches as Turpin in this offense (Zeke averaged 3.4 yards per touch). That’s criminal.
Even Trey Lance, who we can understand is not ready to be a backup quarterback, should at least be involved in a handful of packages that can take advantage of his skill set, but in 13 games this season, he didn’t see a single snap. Why not at least try?
Look, if the starting quarterback goes down, that’s a tough spot. If the play-calling leaves something to be desired, that’s unfortunate. But if you’re incapable of using the players you have to move the football down the field, you shouldn’t be in charge of running the offense.
The Cowboys will decide McCarthy’s future soon. Maybe he stays, maybe he goes. But for some of us fans, we’ve already made our decision and we’d like to see what’s behind door number two. Sure, that’s risky and we have no idea what that could entail, but we know what they have in McCarthy. And when it comes to the football things that a head coach does to help his team win, McCarthy is just really bad at a lot of them.
