The Dallas Cowboys have one of the NFL’s best records through the first 14 weeks of the 2023 season.
Mike McCarthy is under contract with the team through 2024.
These are incontrovertible facts. Black and white. But things get myriad shades of gray in a hurry if you ask owner Jerry Jones to make any sort of proclamation beyond that.
Despite a Sunday-morning headline from NFL insider Ian Rapoport that almost makes it sound like Jones is working on a contract extension for the 60-year-old head coach and play-caller, the truth is there is no news whatsoever on that front.
According to Rapoport, Jones was asked at this week’s league meeting in Dallas “whether he envisions” an extension for McCarthy. Rapoport goes on to state, “The indication was yes.”
But was it really?
Look at what Jones actually said in response:
“That’ll have a course that seeks its own time frame.”
Read that again.
That is a big fat helping of typical Jerry Jones word salad. Ten words that come across as profound on the surface but say absolutely nothing of consequence, a sentence that borders on nonsensical rambling.
He was at least somewhat more definitive with his next utterance:
“I don’t do anything of that sort until the season is over.”
While the Cowboys are, in fact, in great shape heading into Week 15- near the top of most sets of power rankings and a favorite to do damage in the playoffs- they haven’t even matched their win total of last season… or the season before… and there was a not-insignificant faction of Cowboys Nation ready to run McCarthy out of town after both of those January exits.
If the team were to catastrophically collapse over the final four games, or get bounced out of the bracket on Wild Card Weekend, or get spanked in the divisional round, or get blown off the field in the NFC championship, the seat under McCarthy would no doubt- once again- get pretty toasty pretty quickly.
And Jones is a man who insists on keeping his options open.
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Add in the probability that defensive coordinator Dan Quin- (the obvious choice if McCarthy were to no longer be the guy- is eventually going to be offered a head coaching position somewhere he actually wants to go (and would likely take assistants with him), and Jones would be downright foolish to call any sort of a shot now.
A Super Bowl ring (or even, really, just an appearance in the big game) would almost certainly make a McCarthy extension a foregone conclusion, especially after the improvements he’s made to the offense’s production since taking over playcalling duties. As Rapoport rightly suggests, “in most other situations, McCarthy would be the subject of coach of the year talk.”
But despite how casually tossing out a headline about McCarthy and an imminent contract extension makes for a great tease on the Sunday pre-game shows, it’s simply too early for the front office to actually make that kind of decision about McCarthy’s future, despite the way things look right this minute.
And that’s what Jones’s non-answer really means.
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