It’s happening. For the last several weeks, former Green Bay Packers head coach Mike McCarthy has sat atop Cowboys Wire’s potential replacement rankings for the Dallas Cowboys pending vacancy. While the club still has not relieved Jason Garrett of his duties, his contract expires on January 14 and the belief across the board is that he will be separated from the team he’s led for almost a full decade in short order.
The Cowboys have yet to make public any names they are considering as replacements, through announcement, confirmation or leak, and McCarthy is the first name since the end of the season to be directly linked to an interview.
The @Cowboys do plan to meet very soon with Mike McCarthy as NFL Network has reported, a source confirmed.
— Chris Mortensen (@mortreport) January 4, 2020
Source: Former Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy was going to meet w/ the Cowboys on Thursday. He met w/ Cleveland that day & has rescheduled his visit w/ the Jones family for this weekend. He will be their first interview.
— David Moore (@DavidMooreDMN) January 4, 2020
McCarthy, 56, spent 13 years at the helm of the Packers from 2006 through 2018. That spanned the final crazy years of the Brett Favre era and being Aaron Rodgers only head coach until being replaced last offseason.
McCarthy led the Packers to nine playoff appearances in those 13 seasons, four NFC championship games, and Super Bowl XLV, in which they defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers, 31-25. McCarthy was 10-8 in the playoffs and sports a career regular season winning percentage of .618 (125-77-2).
He spent the year away from football after being fired but has made it clear throughout the offseason he was interested in returning to the sideline.
Aside from interviewing with the Cleveland Browns about their opening following the removal of Freddie Kitchens, he has also already met with the New York Giants about their vacant position after the dismissal of Pat Shurmur.
During McCarthy’s final few seasons with the Packers, in which they finished 11-16-1 and failed to make the playoffs in either 2017 or 2018, there was plenty of scuttlebutt about discord between he and quarterback Aaron Rodgers, though both went to great lengths publicly to dispute those narratives.
It’s very possible that just like many other situations when a coach is with one team for a decade or more, that the two simply had enough of each other and the team needed a new voice while McCarthy needed a new roster.
As for his resume, he certainly checks off several boxes in what several owners may be looking for and that’s why he’s sat atop the last couple iterations of our rankings.
McCarthy is a consistent winner, and while his detractors like to point to him winning a lone Super Bowl with an all-time great quarterback for 10 years, that same logic isn’t applied to Don Shula’s time with Dan Marino, Tony Dungy’s time with Peyton Manning, or Sean Payton’s time (ongoing season excluded) with Drew Brees.
He’s also been on the winning end of a handful of playoff matches with Jason Garrett and emerged the victor. That fact isn’t likely lost on the Cowboys’ front office despite how McCarthy’s tenure ended in Green Bay.
Meanwhile, McCarthy spent the offseason studying the dynamic wave of change that has infiltrated the NFL, as he shared towards the end of the season with Peter King.
In the span of three meetings with the 56-year-old McCarthy in the tundra last week, one slide on his deck spoke volumes about where he’s at with the future. It’s his football tech plan.
There’s a flow chart for his proposed 14-person Football Technology Department, including a six-person video unit and an eight-person analytics team. The Chief of Football Technology tops the department, which will run both video and analytics. The top analytics lieutenants will be a Coordinator of Database Management, Coordinator of Football Analytics and Coordinator of Mathematical Innovation. Below them: Football Technology Engineer and two Football Technology Analysts. And finally, a Football Technology Intern. McCarthy spent a day last summer at Pro Football Focus offices in Cincinnati, discovering how much more data is available than he realized. PFF data will be a key component of his analytics tree, as will GPS tracking of players and Next Gen Stats.
McCarthy has spent the last 54 weeks breaking down the tendencies of opposing teams, gleaning what is working on a league-wide level down to the most micro details. Jones recently discussed his apprehension for going with a coach straight from the college ranks due to the fact they won’t be familiar with the rosters of the NFL.
Reading tea leaves, could what’s being reported as a failed attempt to find a front-office place for Jason Garrett have really been a plan to have him as an adviser to a college coach, as was speculated?
Of course, the Week 15 sit down with King was a well-planned effort to boost his signal as the season wore down. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; an older coach doing what is necessary to get himself to the top of wishlists in an era when the NFL wants to move to younger guys shows that he is at least aware of the landscape and willing to adjust as opposed to resting on his resume and reputation.
It appears Dallas is finally ready to move on to the next phase, and they have a loaded roster. Despite the issues that may or may not still exist with coaching a Jerry Jones owned team, the Cowboys boast one of the better rosters in the NFL. Led by quarterback Dak Prescott, the offense was one of the most impressive across the board and there is a lot to be said for a coach who has had a chance to review what went wrong.
The question is, will McCarthy be impressive enough in his pending interview to convince Dallas he can bring about the consistent performances he enjoyed in Wisconsin that have been missing in Texas.
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