Category: Mike McCarthy

Ranking Cowboys coaches by how much they have to prove in 2023

The players get most of the attention, but the coaching staff is under just as much pressure from the front office to win now. Maybe even more so. | From @KDDrummondNFL

It’s funny how all of the attention gets paid to the players. Certainly, they’re the ones who have to go out on the field and put their body through 7-car pile ups each and every week. That doesn’t mean they are the only ones facing the stress of prepping for the season. The guys in charge of putting those players in the best position to succeed, to grow their talent and execution each day; the coaches are under pressure too.

The Dallas Cowboys have what many believe to be a top five or six roster across the entire league. Whether they perform as  one of the league’s best or not will depend on how good of a job the coaching and training staff put them in the best position to succeed for the entire season.

Here are some thoughts on what each of the coaches is facing and a not-to-be-taken-too-serious ranking of how much pressure they’re under.

This top Cowboys’ offseason objective was achieved

While the Cowboys had a full slate of objectives in their offseason minicamps, staying healthy was quite possibly the most important of all. | From @ReidDHanson

With the close of last week’s minicamp, the Cowboys slate of offseason practices officially come to an end. The next time players meet for practice will be in roughly six weeks, when training camp kicks off in Oxnard.

Offseason OTAs (organized team activities) and minicamps are important to every team in the NFL. It’s a time when teams can start installing their playbooks, test players in different roles and rotations, and lay the groundwork for training camp.

For the Cowboys this offseason, it’s especially important since the offense is undergoing a renovation of sorts with Mike McCarthy taking over play-calling and Brian Schottenheimer replacing Kellen Moore as offensive coordinator.

For as important as installs and rotations are, they pale in comparison to health and safety. Getting out of minicamps without suffering any major injuries is always the top objective and it’s an objective the Cowboys thankfully avoided.

“I have no major injury concerns,” McCarthy said following the final practice. “The state of our practice structure is part of that. There’s nobody we’re worried about right now.”

After being fined in each of the previous two seasons for violating NFL offseason practice rules, McCarthy had no choice but to dial things down. A third violation could have resulted in the loss of a draft pick and given the rules themselves are in place to protect the health of players, lighter offseason work is intuitively safer.

Injuries, in general, have long been an issue on McCarthy-led football teams. After Green Bay ranked near the top of the NFL in injuries from 2010-2013 (per Football Outsiders’ adjusted games lost measurement), McCarthy made the conscious effort to focus on health and safety. It’s then when he added GPS tracking to his players (to ensure they weren’t overworked) and when he changed the way his team practiced in the offseason.

“I’ve always felt since the first day I came here that scheduling and how you train a football team is the most important part of the head coach’s job,” McCarthy said in 2014. “That’s another competitive arena you’re in.”

Since McCarthy arrived in Dallas, he’s noticeably treated injuries and rehabs with extra care. Often erring on the side of caution he’s given his veteran players added time off in offseason, preseason, and regular season practices.

While injuries are unavoidable, McCarthy seems to be focused on avoiding as many needless offseason injuries as much as possible. Aside from a quick scare from CeeDee Lamb during the most recent minicamp (he’s fine), the Cowboys appear to have escaped without any new injuries to report.

Several players are still rehabbing from 2022 injuries, but majority are on track to be participants in training camp (with the possible exception of Jourdan Lewis still rehabbing from a lisfranc injury).

The Cowboys were able to lay the groundwork for the 2022 season but more importantly, they were able to escape without fines or injuries. That marks a pretty successful offseason for a McCarthy team.

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Cowboys’ Dak Prescott fine-tuning playbook, relationship with McCarthy: ‘It’s refreshing’

From @ToddBrock24f7: Coach and QB believe more communication now will lead to less extraneous noise- and cleaner play for the Dallas offense- come game day.

For the first time since the 2019 season, the voice in Dak Prescott’s head will be different.

And this one speaks with a distinct Pittsburgh accent.

“It’s different,” the Cowboys quarterback joked with reporters about head coach Mike McCarthy’s new play-calling responsibilities for 2023. “I tell you, you hear that accent a little bit more when he’s calling these plays. He called one out there today, and I looked back, and I go, ‘Was it the right one?’ Yeah, it was, it’s just that his accent was tough to hear. No, it’s been fun.”

Prescott and McCarthy have been together for over three years. But this offseason, it’s like they’re just now getting to know each other.

Kellen Moore was the Dallas offensive coordinator for the past four seasons. He served as the team’s quarterbacks coach in 2018. And he was Prescott’s teammate for the two years prior to that.

This is Prescott’s first NFL offseason without Moore to lean on, but the Cowboys 2023 offense will still be built off the foundation they laid.

“As far as the installation, obviously there are some adds, some things taken out,” Prescott said Thursday. “I think you just get the overall feel that maybe the game is going to be called a little different.

“It’s not like we’re going to throw away our playbook and try to start over, anything like that. Obviously, we’ve had some success. There is good there. We had to take that and detail the hell out of it. Everything we’re doing. Plays we’ve already had, new plays in, just understanding the purpose and just making sure everyone knows the why and what the purpose is in their play and in their roles. Just detailing it all and, I think, will make us play faster and be better.”

Purpose is a word McCarthy is using a lot these days, too. It’s clearly a point of emphasis as he and his quarterback feel each other out in their new working relationship.

“We’ve got a thing called PCP, really just the purpose of the play-call. Play-call purpose: PCP,” the coach explained in his Thursday press conference. “It’s one thing to learn the play and the intricacies of the play, but when you continue to know and anticipate when and where it’s going to be called, I think that’s just stronger communication and connection that a quarterback and play-caller need to have.”

Both men hope that having a better understanding of the purpose of a particular play call in a given situation will reduce the number of sloppy mistakes that helped contribute to a career-high interception total last season for Prescott.

“That’s the detail and the accountability and discipline within a play that all 11 guys have to have,” Prescott offered, “understanding their role and understanding if they’re a clear-out or they’re really eating up a window or eating up a guy to open up that space and for that guy to understand to not kill his window, to open it up and… Yeah, some things I guess some of these young guys may not have heard, and you see it click and you see them understanding early on. It’s just been good. You can see it and feel it and understand everybody is locked in, everyone is buying in to the purpose of it and the purpose of their role, which overall allows us to play faster and play cleaner.”

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And interestingly enough, more communication now on things like play-call purpose means Prescott will actually hear less of McCarthy’s voice in his head on game day: just the play call, no extra reminders of the details of a play.

“No, no, no, leave me alone,” Prescott said of his in-helmet preferences. “Because the time we spend throughout the week. He shouldn’t have to give me a reminder, and I think he would say the same. It’s because we’re going to be talking all week long about the communication, the play, what its purpose is, the situation of the game, down and distance. Therefore, when that play is called, that conversation should have been held a couple of days ago, I know what he’s thinking, why it’s called, where we are in particular with that situation, and how to execute.”

That kind of fine-tuned deep dive of the Cowboys playbook has forced the two to go back through the entire playbook to more closely examine what has worked for the offense of late… and what maybe hasn’t.

“As we broke [Thursday’s practice],” Prescott explained, “[Coach McCarthy] said, ‘You know what? Go look at everything we put in, and make sure we’re running the things you like and the things we’re good at. If it’s something you’re a little iffy about, let’s get it out. Let’s master what we’re great at.’ Just having that clear communication and being able to work with him day in and day out, it’s new, it’s refreshing, it’s fun for both of us.”

The beginning stages of a new relationship are supposed to be refreshing and fun. Cowboys Nation is about to see whether Prescott and McCarthy are destined to make it past this honeymoon phase and be a happily-ever-after kind of couple, complete with shiny new jewelry.

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Cowboys RB Tony Pollard participating in OTA walkthroughs, McCarthy says

From @ToddBrock24f7: The Cowboys RB is making strides in his recovery from a fractured fibula and high ankle sprain; he’s benefiting from the OTAs’ slower pace.

Just four months after being carted off the field in a playoff loss at Levi’s Stadium, Cowboys running back Tony Pollard is participating in OTA sessions with the team.

Dallas head coach Mike McCarthy made the revelation Thursday while speaking to reporters at a pre-practice press conference.

“Tony’s doing the walkthroughs and things like that,” McCarthy said from the podium at The Star in Frisco on the third day of organized team activities.

Pollard suffered a fractured fibula and high ankle sprain on Jan. 22 during the divisional-round matchup with the 49ers. He was dragged to the ground from behind by San Francisco safety Jimmie Ward, who employed a “hip-drop” tackle that many called to be outlawed by the league’s owners moving forward.

That effort may have stalled, but Pollard is plowing full speed ahead in both his rehab and his new role with the offense. He signed his franchise tag tender in March and is set to earn $10.09 million as the club’s uncontested RB1 after the offseason release of Ezekiel Elliott.

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Pollard is not yet up to full game speed, of course, but it’s still early. League rules prohibit live contact during OTAs; McCarthy described the work currently being done as coming at a “walkthrough or jogthrough” pace.

Apart from OTAs, the team will have a four-day “ramp-up” to this summer’s training camp, McCarthy said, that will be designed to help players like Pollard and offensive lineman Terence Steele, who are coming off injury.

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Mike McCarthy on new Cowboys coaches around Dak Prescott: ‘It’s a continuation’

From @ToddBrock24f7: The Cowboys look to build off the past 2 seasons offensively, but with an entirely new staff of assistant coaches around Dak Prescott.

Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott finds himself surrounded by a lot of new faces as OTAs get going in Dallas. And not just guys in the offensive huddle, like Brandin Cooks or Luke Schoonmaker or Deuce Vaughn. Even when Prescott gets back to the sideline or the meeting room, he’ll notice there’s been a lot of turnover since last season.

Kellen Moore is gone. So is Doug Nussmeier. As offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach respectively, theirs were the voices Prescott heard most often under head coach Mike McCarthy’s tenure over the past three seasons.

Now McCarthy is also his play-caller. Brian Schottenheimer has the OC title and is working with him on installing the game plan. Scott Tolzein is his new quarterbacks coach.

It’s a lot of change, even if most of it is behind the scenes.

But McCarthy doesn’t see it that way.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a transition; I think it’s a continuation,” the coach told reporters Thursday from The Star.

The system, McCarthy stressed, is still designed around Prescott, right down to keeping familiar terminology as the 29-year-old (he’ll turn 30 in July) enters his eighth season under center for the Cowboys.

“We’re still in Dak’s language,” McCarthy confirmed.

And although the assistants speaking that language are new to their day-to-day roles this year, they both have plenty of experience operating within a coaching philosophy that McCarthy has built over three decades in the NFL.

One of McCarthy’s first gigs at the pro level was on the offensive side of the ball for the 1993 Chiefs, supporting none other than Joe Montana.

So McCarthy understands all too well the significance of putting Tolzein, who quarterbacked under him in Green Bay, in the same position now with the field general of the Cowboys’ offensive attack.

“The quarterback room is a critical room in your coaching operations, as far as the design of it, the responsibility,” McCarthy continued. “Really, it’s no different than it was back in the early ’90s: the way I view it, the way we define it, the job description, job responsibility. The quarterback coach is a very significant component of that, maybe one of the most important components. The quarterbacks coach does the heavy lifting. That’s the way I’ve always set it up. That’s the way I was fortunate to go through it when I was a quarterbacks coach. All the extra time on the phone that you spend communicating with your quarterbacks, the little things..”

On the field, Tolzein never exactly lit it up over just ten game appearances in four seasons, going 88-of-146 passing for 1,065 yards, two touchdowns, and nine interceptions as both a Packer and a Colt.

McCarthy brought him to Dallas for his mind, though, rather than his arm.

“Scott is built for this. He was the quarterback, as a player, that if everybody was averaging 150 minutes a week on his iPad, Scott was at 480. Just the way he’s wired. And he has the magnetic personality. Brian Schottenheimer has a great personality. The way that room’s structured is similar to the way I’ve always done it in my past experience. It was a little different with Kellen and Doug, but I just look at it as more of a continuation of what’s already been established.”

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What’s been established is that the Cowboys under Prescott are capable of being among the NFL’s elite. Dallas led the league in total yards, yards per game, total points, and points per game in 2021. Those numbers dipped slightly in 2022, but the team still went 12-5 in the regular season and scored 28 points or more in seven of their outings.

That’s a wheel that McCarthy isn’t looking to re-invent, either.

“If you just look at the history of our offense here, 2020 was really trying to figure out who we wanted to be, with all the pandemic and all the injuries and so forth. I think the evolution from ’21 to ’22 is really the direction we want to continue to build off of. If you look at the statistics of those three years of offense and the area of how we’re going, we’ll continue in that direction.”

It all starts with the quarterback and getting Prescott to make some adjustments to his game, particularly in the interception category. McCarthy is banking on the revamped coaching staff around him being the key.

And he made it perfectly clear- even while fulfilling his media obligations by addressing reporters- that’s where his real focus is.

“I’m here right now,” McCarthy complained. “I’m missing a damn quarterbacks meeting.”

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‘Where do those touches go?’: Cowboys’ McCarthy focused on ball distribution in new-look offense

McCarthy says little will change, but after free agency departures, almost 4 out of every 10 touches will have to go someone else in ’23. | From @ToddBrock24f7

The Cowboys offense is currently in the shop. Whether it’s getting a minor tune-up or a massive overhaul remains to be seen. Several staffers are gone. A couple offensive playmakers, too. There are new guys to work into the mix.

Head coach Mike McCarthy maintains that he doesn’t foresee “a huge change” in 2023’s overall scheme or philosophy as compared to 2022’s.

But a deeper dive into the numbers suggest it’s going to have to be a rather significant change, with the team needing to revamp over one-third of all its run and pass plays, no matter how the coach (and now play-caller) chooses to soft-sell it.

“How we play this year will be similar to how we played last year,” McCarthy said Tuesday at the NFL owner meeting in Phoenix.

Maybe.

But without Kellen Moore, without Dalton Schultz, without Ezekiel Elliott… some things will undoubtedly have to be different, as McCarthy is well aware.

“Just look at Zeke’s opportunities,” McCarthy offered. “Where do those touches go? So much of this game is made about how many times you run it or pass it, but it’s really: how do you get the ball distributed to your perimeter players?”

2022’s ball distribution shows just how much the Cowboys leaned on their highly-paid-yet-declining two-time rushing champ.

Dallas logged 531 rushing attempts last regular season, and saw a player officially targeted for a pass attempt on 545 plays. That’s 1,076 legitimate opportunities for someone to have gotten an offensive touch.

Elliott had 254, or 23.6% of them, come his way.

“So you just look at where those touches go,” the coach went on. “Do some of those touches go to receivers? Tight ends? The new backs will definitely absorb some of those opportunities. Maybe Tony’s will go up.”

Pollard’s usage will almost certainly climb… but how much is reasonable to expect? He already nearly matched Elliott’s touch opportunities last season, with 248 total, or 23.0%.

Player Rush Att Pass Tgt Touch Opp Pct of Team Total
Ezekiel Elliott 231 23 254 23.6%
Tony Pollard 193 55 248 23.0%

New addition Ronald Jones will obviously hear his number called more than he did in Kansas City; the Chiefs handed him the ball just 17 times and targeted him once in two game appearances in 2022. And Malik Davis stands to see an increase over his 45 touch chances as a rookie.

But 254 possible touches- Elliott’s share last year- is an awful lot of football pie to divvy up. The former first-round pick ranked in the top 20 leaguewide last year in touches, so we’re not talking about just a few handoffs here and there; almost one in every four of the team’s offensive play calls now has to be designed to go to someone else.

And that doesn’t even factor in two key departures in the passing game. Tight end Dalton Schultz accounted for 89 targets in 2022, or 16.3% of the Cowboys’ pass plays that resulted in a targeted throw (8.2% of the total touch chances).

Noah Brown? Another 74 targets, or 13.5% of pass plays (6.8% of the total).

Player Rush Att Pass Tgt Touch Opp Pct of Team Total
Dalton Schultz 0 89 89 8.2%
Noah Brown 0 74 74 6.8%

In all, Elliott, Schultz, and Brown had 417 touch opportunities in 2022, equivalent to 38.7% of the Cowboys’ total.

Now we’re up to nearly four out of every ten play calls needing to suddenly end up in someone else’s hands.

Thankfully, the Cowboys appear to be assembling a solid cast of playmakers. Brandin Cooks alone is a clear upgrade in the WR corps to work alongside CeeDee Lamb and a hopefully-fully-recovered Michael Gallup. Drafting another tight end threat to add to an already-promising rotation of Jake Ferguson and Peyton Hendershot feels like the right move. And the team may not be done in free agency, either.

“Ball distribution has always been my focal point,” McCarthy explained, “because when you have 70 plays in a game, if you’re not getting the ball distributed 75 percent of those plays, then you’re playing uphill to the defense.”

But now it’s up to McCarthy and new offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer to make the Cowboys’ engine fire on all cylinders to make up for the horsepower that has pulled out of the garage this offseason.

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Cowboys to ‘run the damn ball’ more under McCarthy? Sure, Coach…

McCarthy’s combine quote paints himself as an old-school, three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust guy. But the truth is, he never has been. | From @ToddBrock24f7

Mike McCarthy’s comments from the scouting combine seemed to shed some new light on the decision to part ways with offensive coordinator Kellen Moore following the Cowboys’ divisional-round ouster from the postseason.

But his remarks also raised plenty more questions about what exactly fans will see when the offense takes the field again with McCarthy once more calling plays.

“I think Kellen did an excellent job if you look at the way we played over the course of the last three years,” McCarthy said from the podium in Indianapolis on Wednesday. “As a head coach, every head coach has a vision of how you want the football team to play, what they look like. Our complementary football formula, I felt, was the best this year of the three years, so I think every three, four, five years into your offense, you need to make pretty good – not significant – but changes and adjustments, tendencies and things like that. I just felt this was a good time to make that change.”

Quarterback Dak Prescott explained to reporters during Super Bowl Week that he was told to expect “20 to 30 percent change” in the Dallas offense with McCarthy resuming playcalling duties for the first time since being fired in Green Bay before the 2018 season ended.

The numbers in McCarthy’s own answer Wednesday nudged even higher.

“Thirty, 35 percent is kind of the number we’ve been hovering at as how much change we want for the current players,” he estimated.

So call it a quarter to a third of the offense. That should be a noticeable amount that will look different on Sundays.

“There’s some things, conceptually, that I believe in more in situational football than may have happened the last three years. But, you know, let’s be honest: I had all the input that I wanted the last three years, too.”

And now that he has all the input, at least to hear McCarthy tell it (still six months out), Cowboys fans can expect to see a lot more ground game. His focus, he says, will be more on controlling the clock and less on providing fireworks.

“I’ve been where Kellen has been,” the coach offered. “Kellen wants to light the scoreboard up. But I want to run the damn ball so I can rest my defense. I think when you’re a coordinator, you know, you’re in charge of the offense. Being a head coach and being a playcaller, you’re a little more in tune with [everything]. I don’t desire to be the No. 1 offense in the league. I want to be the No. 1 team in the league with a number of wins and a championship. And if we gotta give up some production and take care of the ball better to get that, then that’s what we’ll do, because we have a really good defense.”

His logic, at least taken at face value, has left many analysts stunned.

“What are you doing?” ESPN’s Dan Graziano asked on-air Thursday morning. “Are you admitting to the world that you fired your offensive coordinator because you scored too many points?”

“If you think that just running the football is the key determining factor in winning a Super Bowl in the NFL,” Dan Orlovsky added, “you’re watching a different NFL than me right now.”

The Super Bowl champion Chiefs, who just happened to have the league’s passing leader and MVP in Patrick Mahomes, led the NFL this year in points scored, yards gained, passing yards, and passing touchdowns.

But they finished the season 20th in rushing yards.

In 2021, Dallas led the league in points scored and yards gained. They finished second in passing yards and third in passing touchdowns, but were bounced in the wild-card round.

That same year, the Rams were the ones hoisting the Lombardi Trophy. They had the Offensive Player of the Year and the receiving yards leader in Cooper Kupp… and also the 25th-ranked rushing attack.

Running the damn ball is not some magic express-lane pass to winning a championship.

But McCarthy actually knows that, too.

His lone Super Bowl win came with the 2010 Packers. They were 24th in the league in rushing yards that season; their air attack ranked fifth.

In fact, a broader look at his rushing-versus-passing rankings in his full seasons as head coach and playcaller in Green Bay shows a heavier overall lean (and generally, more success) toward throwing the ball.

Yr Pass Att Rk Pass Yds Rk Rush Att Rk Rush Yds Rk
2006 1 8 21 23
2007 6 2 28 21
2008 9 8 14 17
2009 11 7 15 14
2010 16 5 20 24
2011 14 3 26 27
2012 16 9 16 20
2013 18 6 12 7
2014 20 8 14 11
2015 18 25 12 12
2016 5 7 29 20
2017 14 25 27 17

Sure, there’s more to the story than just those stats. There were the two years that running back Edie Lacy was a bona fide monster. There were two years when Aaron Rodgers missed a big chunk of the season due to injury. There was the 2015 season when McCarthy gave up playcalling, only to take it back in December. There were times when he was panned for stubbornly sticking to the run instead of putting the ball in the hands of his future Hall of Fame quarterback, and there was the widely publicized drama between McCarthy and Rodgers that dated all the way back to the 2005 draft and stayed ugly for much of their time together.

Those bits of history certainly lend extra perspective to (and sometimes skew) McCarthy’s playcalling past, but the fact remains that, on the whole, the longtime coach is still seen as a quarterbacks guy who’s only too happy to put the ball in the air.

After all, he worked with Joe Montana, Brett Favre, and Rodgers before arriving in Dallas for what were supposed to be Prescott’s prime years.

So while McCarthy did plainly say, “I want to run the damn ball,” he also clearly stated that the team needs to “take care of the ball better.” Logically, Prescott’s interception totals will go down if he’s always handing the ball off.

And he emphasized the importance of the defense having another smothering year under Dan Quinn… even while hinting that he’d like them to be on the field a little less.

All are, in fact, sound arguments.

But while the headlines will zero in on some new-and-yet-also-antiquated three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust mentality from the 59-year-old coach, it’s probably best not to take every press-conference quote given on the first day of March at face value.

It is, let’s remember, smokescreen season.

And McCarthy and the Cowboys could be content to keep fans- and opposing teams- guessing as to their true intentions and plans as they begin to tinker with a new-look offense.

“I just felt that this was the right time. Different fastball, different curveball, different changeup, you know. I think it’ll serve us well.”

McCarthy was actually talking about taking over playcalling responsibilities from Moore when he said that on Thursday.

Of course, the real curveball may be getting the rest of the NFL to believe that he’s the one who’s suddenly changed up and become a run-first coach and playcaller.

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These WRs fit Mike McCarthy’s prototypes, will Cowboys draft any of them?

An NFL combine primer of what Mike McCarthy has historically targeted in WRs and which players fit that profile in this year’s NFL Draft. | From @ProfessorO_NFL

Football teams utilize various offensive schemes to outscore opponents, and one of the most trusted and duplicated is the West Coast Offense. Legendary coaches such as Bill Walsh and Mike Holmgren popularized this scheme, and current Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy has his own history with it, having utilized it during his time with the Green Bay Packers.

McCarthy’s version of the West Coast offense will be on display as he’s named himself playcaller and tapped Brian Schottenheimer as his offensive coordinator. It’s time to educate ourselves on the type of wide receiver they would seek to fit the scheme.

Cowboys’ Mike McCarthy entering very rare air among all-time NFL head coaches

With 155 regular-season wins, the Cowboys coach is set to possibly surpass several legitimate legends during the 2023 campaign. | From @ToddBrock24f7

Quick, without Googling it, where does Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy rank among NFL head coaches in all-time regular-season wins?

The answer, despite the rumblings from some corners of the fanbase that have called for his dismissal after every one of his three seasons thus far in Dallas, may come as quite a surprise.

Entering his 17th season as a head coach, McCarthy’s regular-season record is 155-97-2.

Those 155 wins place him 20th all-time.

Seriously.

And, barring an utter catastrophe, the 59-year-old will likely move past a massive legend or two at some point during the 2023 season.

With three more wins, McCarthy will tie Bud Grant, the longtime Vikings coach who led Minnesota to four Super Bowl appearances.

Six victories will put him alongside Mike Holmgren, who is enshrined in both the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame and the Seattle Seahawks Ring of Honor.

If the Cowboys can get to 11 wins this upcoming season, McCarthy will move into 15th place beside the legendary Paul Brown, a coach so enmeshed within the fabric of the NFL that he has a team named after him… as well as another team’s home stadium.

Of the 19 head coaches ahead of McCarthy on the all-time wins list, eight already have a bust in Canton.

It’s rarefied air indeed.

But his ascension to the Top 20 has seen McCarthy pass many coaching greats along the way, even if it happened somewhat unceremoniously.

He overtook Joe Gibbs, Bill Cowher, and Marv Levy just last season; all three are Hall of Famers.

And McCarthy had already blown by the likes of Tony Dungy, Hank Stram, Mike Ditka, Dick Vermeil, Don Coryell, John Madden, Bill Walsh, and a guy named Vince Lombardi.

Of course, coaching wins are a longevity record more than a pure measure of prowess, with the men who manage to stay on the sidelines for the most seasons rising to the top of the list. But not all NFL seasons throughout history are created equal. In Lombardi’s first season in Green Bay, a regular season was just 12 games. So yes, McCarthy and his contemporaries are currently getting five extra shots per season to notch an additional W.

With regular-season wins piling up at a faster clip for today’s coaches, it’s perhaps no surprise that so many of the names around McCarthy on the all-time list are current. He, Pete Carroll, and Mike Tomlin are all within eight victories of one another. Sean Payton and John Harbaugh both trail McCarthy by three and eight wins, respectively.

The Cowboys have fallen painfully short of the ultimate goal the past two seasons, and that’s ultimately how teams and coaches are judged and remembered. McCarthy would be the first to agree. But walking off the field a winner 155 times is no small feat, and as McCarthy keeps adding to that total in 2023, he’ll put himself in increasingly exclusive company.

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McCarthy history speaks to where TE is in Cowboys’ offseason priorities

Looking at Mike McCarthy’s last seasons in Green Bay we can predict how much he plans to use 12 personnel with the Dallas Cowboys in 2023. | From @ReidDHanson

As the Cowboys mull over their roster and make decisions regarding pending free agents, they must decide what kind of offense they intend to run.

Are they a passing offense that leans on 11 personnel (three receiver sets). Are they a running offense that goes heavy on the line and uses multiple running backs? Or are they something in between and an offense that uses multiple tight ends?

Looking back at Mike McCarthy’s past could give insight to what the new offensive playcaller intends to do. It can indicate how he intends to build the team and how he wants to invest resources (both in free agency and the draft).

Using tracking data at nfelo we can see the frequency in which Dallas used certain personnel groupings. Looking at first-down packages to adjust for in-game context, we can see how frequently the Cowboys leaned on 12 personnel.

In 2022, Dallas used 12 personnel on 31% of their first-down snaps. This rate ranked No. 6 across the league. In McCarthy’s last full season with the Packers, he used 12 personnel just 15 percent of the time, ranking No. 29 in NFL.

That season was hardly an outlier, with Green Bay going 12 personnel just seven percent of the time the season prior (second to last in 2016). All which indicting a McCarthy offense isn’t one that favors multiple tight end sets.

At face value, this doesn’t bode well for Dalton Schultz’s future in Dallas. Schultz is a free agent in March, and figures to command top-of-the-market money. With the rising talent of Jake Ferguson, Sean McKeon and Peyton Hendershot lurking in the shadows, McCarthy may not see a need for a pricey veteran.

McCarthy may intend to field an attack that greater resembles his old Green Bay teams in 2023. Then again, his previous personnel packages could be a byproduct of what he had to work with and not preferred strategy.

“Marty Schottenheimer used to say it all the time, ‘Think of players, not plays’ ” McCarthy reminisced back in Green Bay.

Perhaps McCarthy gained the reputation as a receiver-heavy play designer because he just always seemed to have more receivers than tight ends. In Dallas, he has access to the level of tight end depth he rarely had with the Packers.

The catch is if McCarthy wants to keep his tight end personnel, he’s going to have to do something about it. Schultz is a free agent so McCarthy will have to lobby the front office to keep or replace the personnel.

If he wants to move back to what made him famous with the Packers, he’s going to be more interested in receivers and less inclined to spend limited resources on redundancies like extra tight ends.

Will McCarthy scrap the frequent use of 12 personnel in 2023?

His past indicates he will move away from it but given the shallow depth at receiver in Dallas right now, a major overnight swing would be difficult.

The Cowboys initial moves (or lack thereof) in free agency will be very telling with what McCarthy plans to do as an offense. Will Schultz walk? Will Dallas sign any viable veteran depth at tight end or receiver?

How they handle free agency should be very indicative to what they’re planning in 2023

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