Mike McCarthy won 12 games in each of his first three seasons as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. You don’t fire a head coach who’ll give you a dozen wins each year.
Mike McCarthy is also 1-3 in the playoffs in three seasons as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, a team that hasn’t been to the NFC conference championship in nearly 30 years. Those guys *do* get fired.
That’s why, days after suffering a 48-32 thrashing at the hands of his former team, the Green Bay Packers, it was an actual news item that a guy who is 36-15 at the helm of the Cowboys is returning for a contractually obligated fourth season.
This just in: Dallas is not making a head-coaching change and Cowboys’ HC Mike McCarthy is returning for the 2024 season, per sources. pic.twitter.com/GHMJuqdxaT
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) January 18, 2024
There are two ways to look at this.
The first is that it may produce the NFC East’s first repeat champion since 2004. McCarthy gets back an MVP candidate quarterback in Dak Prescott, one of the league’s most prolific wide receivers in CeeDee Lamb, an offensive line with up to three different 2023 All-Pros (if Tyron Smith re-signs with the club) and a defense loaded with stars like Trevon Diggs, DaRon Bland, Micah Parsons and whatever a 32-year-old DeMarcus Lawrence can still contribute. To blow it all up at head coach and start over would be a tough sell, and a few tweaks could be all the team needs to find glory.
The other, more pessimistic view, would be to say McCarthy has been a disaster when his team needs him the most. His one playoff win with the Cowboys was over an 8-9 Tampa Bay Buccaneers team with blocking so bad it finally forced Tom Brady into retirement. While he’s had eight teams win 10 or more games over the last 11 years, only two have made it as far as the NFC title game. Two of his three season-ending losses in Dallas have come as a betting favorite.
In short, here’s where Mike McCarthy brings the Cowboys in the regular season:
And here’s where he ends up in the playoffs:
Everyone’s bound to backslide in the postseason thanks to a more robust level of competition. But McCarthy goes from one of the NFL’s best teams to being roughly as good as the Derek Carr Las Vegas Raiders. The other two teams on their regular season tier from 2021-2023 are the San Francisco 49ers and Buffalo Bills, who have each won at least three games in the postseason in that stretch and been to at least one conference title game, with more potentially on the way.
The Cowboys? They’re 1-3 with a newfound tradition of waving goodbye to their offense at the first sign of adversity. Dak Prescott is a top five regular season quarterback in that span, tossing 96 touchdowns in 45 games while recording a 101.8 passer rating and 0.190 expected points added (EPA) per play, fourth-best in the NFL. In the playoffs he’s got nine touchdowns in four games (good!), an 89.5 rating (decent) and 0.100 EPA per play (17th best out of 32 playoff quarterbacks).
This is the McCarthy curse. It’s a lot of things — clock management, a questionable use of challenges (only three in the last two seasons, winning one), an occasionally baffling viewpoint on player usage (see Ezekiel Elliott’s carries vs. the Niners in last year’s playoffs) — but the biggest issue is his inability to make anyone better in the biggest games of the season. While other teams climb, McCarthy’s teams search for the path of least resistance. When they can’t find one, they collapse. Sometimes with a whimper and sometimes with the bang of a 48-16 fourth quarter deficit against the Packers.
Team owner Jerry Jones clearly expects more, but why? Retaining McCarthy is a less expensive, higher floor, risk averse move than trying to bring in Bill Belichick, Jim Harbaugh, Mike Vrabel or a hot young coordinator like Ben Johnson or Bobby Slowik. Unfortunately, history suggests it has no meaningful upside.
Since his 2010 Super Bowl run McCarthy has won exactly one playoff game as an underdog of more than a single point (two games as an underdog total). And it came in Dallas, against the Cowboys, because Aaron Rodgers was effectively a super hero that winter.
But, sure, maybe this is just a war of attrition. Maybe this is a battle between Zapp Branigan and the Killbots and all McCarthy has to do is keep sending talented teams into the thresher until the rest of the NFC shuts down from the fatigue of beating them. Perhaps time is not linear like we thought and everything that worked in 2010 will once again be relevant in 2024.
Or maybe the Cowboys will blast off in the regular season, earn the buy-in of fans across Texas once more, then fly their spaceship directly into the sun in a futile effort to teach us something. Armed with the last three years of McCarthy data, it’s probably gonna be the latter.