Before Cowboys fans had even finished celebrating the long-awaited split with Jason Garrett, Jerry Jones turned around and hired a coach who is essentially a clone of the one he just let go. Mike McCarthy has been hired as the eighth coach in Dallas Cowboys history.
Many, including me, believed that Jones might go with a young offensive mind or a defensive coach, but, in the end, he went with neither. McCarthy is a veteran play-caller with a background in Bill Walsh’s West Coast Offense. While at one time McCarthy was seen as a bright offensive mind, that reputation faded away over the last few years of his tenure in Green Bay as his offense grew stale in the years following the Packers’ Super Bowl run in 2010.
Green Bay fired him last offseason and replaced him with Matt LaFleur, who had worked under Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan, in an effort to modernize the offense after years of watching McCarthy’s unimaginative scheme waste Aaron Rodgers.
Right before the hiring cycle began, McCarthy stepped back into the spotlight. NBC Sports’ Peter King wrote a feature on how McCarthy had used the past year to learn from his mistakes. That included putting together a mock coaching staff that studied new offensive trends from around the league while also putting together plans for an analytics department for his next team. Whether or not these lessons McCarthy has apparently learned will stick remains to be seen — over in the NBA, Tom Thibodeau did the whole “changed man” routine before repeating his mistakes in Minnesota and getting fired — but the veteran coach said all the right things to get hired…
“I think this time with the other coaches has given me that opportunity, and you have to be honest. We got away from motion and shifts and multiple personnel groups that we used in the past, so you look at the why . . . and quite frankly you apply it to the next opportunity.”
The big knock against McCarthy’s offense was the lack of creativity he’s hinting at there. Green Bay’s offense mostly stayed in static, three-receiver formations that did little to help create open throws. Making matters worse, McCarthy didn’t use play-action nearly enough, which further stifled the Packers’ passing game. Over the last four seasons of the McCarthy era, Green Bay ranked higher than 26th in play-action usage only once … when it finished 16th. Cowboys fans have spent the last few seasons complaining about those same issues. At least they’ll be able to recycle their old tweets.
McCarthy’s apparent dive into analytics has also convinced people he was a good pick for the Cowboys, but there are reasons to be skeptical. Until we see him employ the lessons that the analytics community has taught us over the last decade, it’s just talk. Yes, McCarthy has typically gone for it on fourth down at a higher rate than his peers, which nerds will love, but there are also examples of him going against that tendency in more high-profile games while using “the numbers” to justify his decision. He’s also mentioned hitting certain benchmarks for rushing attempts in a game, which is a sure-fire way to get roasted by Stats Twitter…
“If you want to question my playcalling … I’m not questioning it” McCarthy said after a playoff loss in 2015. “I came in here to run the ball. The one statistic I had has as far as a target to hit was 20 rushing attempts in the second half; I thought that would be a very important target to hit for our offense.”
And this analytics movement isn’t just about being more aggressive on fourth down. The lack of play-action and pre-snap motion, along with the insistence on running for X amount of carries in a game, is far more concerning from an analytical standpoint.
(It’s also worth asking how inclined Jones will be to hire McCarthy’s dream analytics staff and how much say it would have in crafting the roster. Do we really think Jerry Jones is going to listen to some nerd about how inefficient running the ball is and how running backs don’t matter after he just gave Ezekiel Elliott that monster deal?)
McCarthy’s outdated offense remains the biggest concern, but he outlined the modern concepts he was looking to add to his playbook in 2020 in the Peter King piece:
“You can take the same exact formation, and a shift and a jet motion will look exactly the same to the defense. Then you figure all the plays you can run off that formation—run strong, run weak, an RPO [run-pass option for the quarterback], a quarterback-keep, and a full fake with a downfield pass. When Frank [Cignetti, his offensive co-designer] and I are designing the offense, we say let’s have five plays, or maybe a six-pack of plays, that fit a distinct shift and motion with different purposes.”
I mean, to us, that all sounds great, but what McCarthy described isn’t exactly on the cutting edge. That’s essentially what every offensive coach in the league is doing. That he considers these new ideas in 2019 is a major red flag. Has he really needed a year off just to catch up to where the rest of the league was years ago?
When King describes the more specific concepts McCarthy has been studying, it’s stuff we’ve seen in the NFL for a couple years now. For instance, basic RPOs, which apparently blew McCarthy’s mind:
When McCarthy showed me some plays to illustrate what he’d import into his offense, the one I liked most came from the third play of the Cowboys 2019 season. “RPO Dover” is what McCarthy called this. On second-and-eight from the Dallas 40, the Cowboys lined up in a power-run formation … At the snap, Prescott play-actioned to Elliott, flowing to his right. Nine Giants flowed to that side. Prescott pulled the ball out of Elliott’s gut. Both receivers ran quick in-routes, unchallenged by defenders, and Prescott flipped to Cooper, inside, for one of the easiest nine-yard gains of his life. First down.
McCarthy was visibly excited by the play. “The beauty of it,” he said excitedly, “is you can still run. It’s a clean run. But the free yards on the pass . . . that is such a smart design.”
Or jet motion, which first took the league by storm in … 2014:
[H]is coaching group studied every offensive snap of the top 10 offenses last year, and they’ve continued dissecting the best teams this year. And they’ve found how the smart offensive teams—the Rams, the Niners, even the Bills—are using varieties of motion speeds, and different snap-points, and frustrating defenses.
“As a play-caller, you’ve got to stress the defense,” McCarthy said, “and one of the things watching all these teams has shown us is how good some teams are at challenging the eye discipline of the defense. Makes ‘em think at the snap of the ball, which is huge. This bullet-motion sweep, this jet motion, at different tempos, different speeds. I just really like what it does to a defense. We call those things ‘nuisances’ for the defense.”
It’s one thing to recognize the effectiveness of a concept — even if it’s been nearly a decade since every college team in the country started using them. It’s another to effectively blend the concept with the rest of the playbook. And it’s yet another thing to stay out ahead of the schematic evolution. Even with all this free time to study, McCarthy already appears to be a step behind.
The hope for some Cowboys fans is that McCarthy will retain offensive coordinator Kellen Moore, who impressed during his first season as a play-caller, and come up with a hybrid scheme that involves the more modern concepts that Moore used to great effect in 2019. That would be the ideal scenario, but McCarthy is a veteran head coach who has already out together a brain-trust of coaches. I don’t know if him keeping around a 31-year-old head coach and putting him in a prominent role is realistic. In all likelihood, McCarthy will hire a staff of his own people, which will include long-time NFL defensive coordinator Jim Haslett and his former offensive coordinator Joe Philbin in some capacity.
If that’s the case, and this new and improved McCarthy is nothing more than a show put on to impress owners who like to hear cool buzzwords, the Cowboys will be right back where they were a year ago at this time: Stuck with a head coach devoid of new, original ideas who gets too conservative in high-pressure situations … only with less clapping.
