Mike McCarthy makes himself a liar, gives play-calling duties to Kellen Moore

The new head coach goes back on his word from five years ago, but is he keeping true to himself?

Mike McCarthy is a liar, but this could be a very good thing.

For much of the 2015 season, McCarthy had his offensive coordinator Tom Clements call plays for the Green Bay Packers’ offense. That decision was made in Februrary 2015 and lasted until the team had another anemic offensive performance, failing to score in the first half against the Detroit Lions. The Packers won that game, 27-23, on a 61-yard Hail Mary from Aaron Rodgers with no time left on the clock after a face mask penalty on the Lions’ Devin Taylor gave Green Bay one last chance that Rodgers cashed in on. The next week, against Dallas no less, McCarthy took the reigns back to his offense.

Following the season, McCarthy vowed that he would never relinquish his play-calling duties again. Yet here we are, less than two weeks into his tenure as the head honcho of the Dallas Cowboys, and McCarthy is proving himself an untruther. He’s going to allow wunderkind Kellen Moore to call the plays.

Why is this a good thing?

The easy explanation, and although it can’t be ruled out doesn’t exactly fit with the rest of the decisions being made around The Star in Frisco – the Cowboys football complex McCarthy says he hasn’t left since landing in Jerry Jones’ helicopter – is that Jones implored McCarthy to not only keep Moore on staff, but made the decision for the coach that Moore needed to call plays.

The more plausible explanation is that, after spending two weeks in the building doing nothing but scouring over potential configurations for his staff and how they will go about day-to-day business, McCarthy landed on the decision that staying with Moore being the direct voice in quarterback Dak Prescott’s ear is the best way to transition for the 2020 season.

The game-day voice will be the same, the verbiage will be the same and that continuity could go a long way towards continuing the progress Prescott started to make in 2019. There already will be a new voice in Prescott’s ears during the work week, as the club didn’t retain Jon Kitna as QB coach and instead moved Doug Nussmeier over; a man whose resume screamed for that designation more than it did for him to be the TE coach he has been in the last few seasons.

McCarthy seems to have a plan, shake things up, but don’t shake them up so much that it puts a smart quarterback at a disadvantage.

Nussmeier will be a new voice, but not one unfamiliar to Prescott. McCarthy’s West Coast Offense will be adding a slew of new plays and progressions to Prescott’s world, but in keeping Moore, the exchanges of the play calls to Prescott will come in the same lingo – McCarthy will adapt the language of his offense and not force Prescott to learn that as well.

McCarthy is making the 2016 version of himself a liar, but in doing so, he’s making the 2020 version of himself, the interviewed version where he told the world he self-analyzed and discovered things about his approach he wanted to do differently. He’s doing that, giving up play-calling to a young, innovative guy. That’s a wholly different scenario than when he handed the reigns to a 60+-year-old Clements five seasons ago.

The Cowboys 2019 offense, in general, worked extremely well. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but for a second-year coach and first-time play caller, finishing atop the league rankings in yards is an accomplishment and finishing No. 6 in points scored is as well. Dallas was the first team in 30 year to finish with a triple-digit scoring differential and not win at least nine games. There’s certainly reasonable thought that side of the ball should be augmented, not scrapped and rebuilt.

That seems to be the initial approach of McCarthy, who has claimed he will also have a large analytical staff that will help prepare him for some of the in-game decisions he’ll have to make, and hopefully be more in tune with the modern philosophy of letting situational likelihoods affect the scripting and risk taking.

This may be just the first step, but in making the old him a liar, McCarthy is staying true to his word.

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