The news crossed the wires Friday with relatively little fanfare. But reports that defensive tackle Gerald McCoy had announced his retirement from football were met by many a Cowboys fan with a knowing nod and a brief shake of the head about what might have been.
McCoy’s career wearing Cowboys gear can be measured in mere minutes, but the way it all went down has affected the team for years, and the hole that the six-time Pro Bowler left in the Dallas roster is one the front office is still trying to patch up.
The third overall pick in the 2010 draft, McCoy was a Week 1 starter in Tampa Bay as a rookie. Upper-body injuries plagued his first two seasons, though, causing him to miss 13 of 32 games in 2010 and 2011.
He came back on a mission the following year, earning the first of six straight Pro Bowl nods and starting a stretch of seven consecutive campaigns logging five or more sacks and averaging 36 tackles per season.
The Bucs released McCoy during the 2019 offseason; the Panthers signed him shortly thereafter. After one year in Carolina, the Oklahoma native joined the Cowboys in 2020, just as the Mike McCarthy era was beginning.
McCoy was to be a key piece of new coordinator Mike Nolan’s unit, with Maliek Collins suddenly gone, the Trysten Hill experiment just a year old, and third-round draft pick Neville Gallimore barely beginning his NFL adventure. The Cowboys even brought in McCoy’s former Carolina linemate Dontari Poe to beef up the new-look defensive front.
McCoy had signed a bargain of a contract to play for the Cowboys, and he further endeared himself to the fanbase during the COVID-wracked offseason in virtual interviews with his infectious personality and his willingness to speak up as a locker room leader during the tumultuous social upheaval that summer brought to both the country and the NFL. He even called out Cowboys owner Jerry Jones publicly in the wake of 2020’s equal-rights protests, beseeching the up-to-then silent billionaire to “say something… anything” on the occasion of Juneteenth, even before he himself had even suited up for the club.
It was a marriage with so much promise.
But on the very first day of padded practice with his new team, McCoy ruptured a quad tendon in one-on-one drills. He was done for the season. He was released via an injury clause in the contract he had just signed, to make room on the roster for another player, but the plan was for him to remain a part of the team, mentoring younger players as he worked to rehab his way back to the lineup.
“He expressed not only a desire to be here and be part of what we’ve started here,” McCarthy said at the time. “Obviously, he’s very comfortable, and this is where he wants to be. That’s exactly what he communicated to me.”
But his return to the Cowboys roster never happened. In fact, he couldn’t know it at the time, but his pro football carer had only a few more snaps in it.
McCoy was picked up by Las Vegas in August of 2021, almost a year to the day after his injury in Dallas. But during the Raiders’ overtime win over Baltimore in Week 1, McCoy’s left knee gave way and he had to be carted off the field after just nine defensive plays for the silver and black.
After not playing in the league in 2022, the 35-year-old McCoy retired Friday having never played in a postseason game.
Nevertheless, “I had a blast,” he said on The Carton Show.
THANK YOU!!! pic.twitter.com/NxE9K4TfJK
— Gerald McCoy (@Geraldini93) April 14, 2023
The Cowboys’ interior defensive line has been in flux ever since McCoy went down that day at The Star. Poe and Everson Griffen were cut midseason. Nolan lost his DC job. Antwaun Woods left for Indianapolis. Carlos Watkins was brought in the next year; Osa Odighizuwa and Quinton Bohanna were drafted. Brent Urban came and went. John Ridgeway was drafted and then lost when the Cowboys tried to sneak him through waivers. Hill finally flamed out. Johnathan Hankins was acquired via trade and then re-signed to a new one-year deal. Watkins moved on in March.
Entering the 2023 draft, defensive tackle prospects like Michigan’s Mazi Smith, Pitt’s Calijah Kancey, and Wisconsin’s Keeanu Benton are ones that many think the Cowboys should be eyeing.
One can only wonder how much of that would have happened if McCoy had stayed healthy upon arriving in Dallas.
As it is, his brilliant pro career was cut short far too early and without many of the accolades that McCoy, by all rights, absolutely deserved.
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