5 Reasons Mike McCarthy is not the Right Head Coach for Dallas Cowboys
Super Bowl winning coach.
12 wins in a row for the first time in 23 years.
Sitting with a 4-2 record.
If you take a step back, Mike McCarthy’s record looks pretty good. He has a Lombardi Trophy on his resume and the Dallas Cowboys are winning games. What more could you ask for?
Answer: Another Lombardi trophy
Winning football games is great, and the Cowboys are winning. Despite their Super Bowl drought, they continue to rank in the top 10 in winning percentage over the last 20 years. The team has had a lot of regular season success, but somehow doesn’t seem to excel in the postseason. McCarthy had to be the answer to fix that. This is his fourth season as the head coach of the Cowboys, and while he has had some success, his future in Dallas still seems to be uncertain. If the Cowboys still can’t get past the divisional round, should the McCarthy experiment end?
The results speak volumes, but there are other factors that could send McCarthy over the line. We’ve identified five pieces of evidence that suggest he’s not a very good coach, which could ultimately lead to his departure in 2024.
REASON 1: GREEN BAY FIX
McCarthy left Green Bay in a slump as he finished his tenure with two straight losses after previously stringing together eight straight winning seasons, including a Super Bowl victory in 2010. It was widely debated whether the Packers’ failures were due to McCarthy or something in the administration that didn’t give the coach enough troops to compete. But after McCarthy left Green Bay, the Packers had three straight 13-win seasons. Such a positive change for the better leads to the idea that maybe McCarthy could be the problem for Green Bay.
REASON 2: FIRST YEAR DISASTER
While Green Bay did well without McCarthy, the Cowboys immediately went off the rails in McCarthy’s first year as head coach. Some are quick to put an asterisk on this season because of Dak Prescott’s season-ending injury and it being the year of COVID, but many other things have not gone well for the Cowboys this season. McCarthy and his new defensive coordinator, Mike Nolan, tried to install a new defense without access to spring practice or a full training camp. Yes, it really happened. The new coaches tried to direct the players to the new defense with Zoom. Instead of using his players to their strengths, he inserted them into his scheme and let them run around like chickens with their heads cut off. It was crazy. McCarthy’s defense ended up giving up the most points in the franchise’s 60-year history. There was chaos in the locker room, star players aired their grievances in the media, and eventually Nolan was fired. As for McCarthy, he got a pass.
3. REASON: LACK OF PREPARATION
The Cowboys defense looked absolutely unbeatable in 2020, and it wasn’t because they didn’t have good players. It was a disastrous training. The hiring of Dan Quinn fixed all of that in a hurry, as it was a night and day contrast between Nolan and Quinn’s defense. Even if the team is playing much better now, the cowboys still make a lot of mistakes because they have become the toughest team in the league.
2021 = 141 penalties (most in NFL)
2,022 = 113 penalties (3rd most in NFL)
2,023 = 46 penalties (most in NFL)
Since 2021, the Cowboys have committed 300 penalties, the most in the league.
They looked very confused on Monday night. They didn’t get the right number of players in defense (sometimes 12, sometimes 10). They had to burn deadlines three different times because they weren’t ready. And they even stopped the game using pre-movement to avoid taking even more penalties. It was not fun to watch.
Penalties happen either because players are not good enough (so they stay) or because they lack discipline and are careless. The cowboys have good players and penalties happen all over the place, so it all points to general carelessness and very little accountability. Instead of expressing frustration, McCarthy rants, blames the officials and a “it’ll fix itself” attitude that explains why it keeps happening. That means the Cowboys are forced to fight this built-in handicap because management isn’t good enough to fix it.
REASON 4: PROPER PLAY CALLS
The Cowboys offense was better with Kellen Moore. We know this because Moore and a healthy Dak Prescott wreaked havoc across the league moving the ball and scoring. It wasn’t always perfect, but most of the time it was amazing and we all enjoyed it immensely. But all of that was suddenly forgotten when the offense didn’t work last season and turned the ball over too much. An offense that lacked receiver depth and a quarterback with the career résumé of a ball runner suddenly wasn’t a sniffer.
The Cowboys smartly improved their receiving corps by trading Brandin Cooks and have a healthier version of Michael Gallup and an improved Jalen Tolbert. But they unwisely replaced their young point coordinator with an ultra-conservative, judgmental negative “let’s play our defense” style of offense led by McCarthy.
As a result, explosive games disappeared. There are occasional drives, but they don’t land in the red zone (Brandon Aubrey leads the league in field goals under 30 yards). They are averaging just five yards per play, a 19-year low. With a year of advanced weapons and a fully healthy quarterback, the offense somehow managed to take a big step back.
McCarthy was once a good offensive coordinator. That is never true. But to believe that he’s evolved and can outmatch the current defensive coordinators in the league might be more wishful thinking than anything else.
REASON 5: IN-GAME DECISIONS
Resetting the defense and giving up the most points in franchise history was bad. Not being the most penalized team in the league is also bad. And to take over a play call only to get the worst marks for play performance in nearly two decades is really bad. McCarthy showed all of these things. But there is more. We’ve also experienced many instances where his in-game coaching decisions are absolutely terrible. Granted, some of those mistakes will be brushed aside because they ultimately didn’t have a negative impact, but that doesn’t change the fact that he made a bad coaching decision. There are many examples of this during McCarthy Dallas and we have provided a handful of receipts…
The decision to challenge usually comes from above, but McCarthy seems to have his own system at times. He either has incompetent assistants who hang him out to dry, or he goes rogue and just stubbornly trusts his instincts. Neither is good. We sure wish he was as adamant about throwing a challenge ticket when he coached the Packers in 2014.
There are several other examples where McCarthy doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing when it comes to clock management and it’s squandered opportunities for them to get points.
You probably have McCarthy’s list of atrocities because it seems. world problems happen on your own list McCarthy atrocities. At some point you have to ask yourself, are McCarthy’s in-game decisions a positive or a detriment to this team?
It’s pretty clear that McCarthy isn’t doing a lot of things right as a coach. Maybe you can argue against one or the other, but this collection of coaching calls shows that he may not be the coach he once was. The Cowboys hired McCarthy in hopes that he would bring some of that past to Dallas, but it’s not looking so good and this could be the last season we see McCarthy coaching the Cowboys.
