NFL Analysis
1/18/24
7 min read
Dallas Cowboys Retain Mike McCarthy, But Was It Right Decision?
It was shocking to see the Dallas Cowboys lose convincingly 48-32 to the Green Bay Packers in the wild-card round. Perhaps more shocking was the announcement on Wednesday that Mike McCarthy would return as head coach for the 2024 season.
Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising. In contrast to his reportedly heavy day-to-day involvement in team activities and personnel decisions, Jerry Jones has been patient with head coaches. Jason Garrett got nine years as the Cowboys’ head coach after he took over as the interim during the 2010 season. That tenure resulted in just three playoff appearances and two wins.
To his credit, McCarthy already has more 12-win seasons than Garrett during his entire tenure and has made the playoffs in the past two seasons, though that has produced only one playoff win.
Keeping McCarthy is a safe and defendable decision. The Cowboys improved as a team when McCarthy took more responsibility on the offensive side of the ball.
After parting ways with Kellen Moore, McCarthy took over the play calling. Dallas went from seventh in EPA per play and 14th in success rate during the 2022 season to second in EPA per play and fourth in success rate in 2023, according to TruMedia. QB Dak Prescott was an MVP candidate and was voted as the second-team All-Pro.
Since McCarthy took over as head coach for the Cowboys, only the Kansas City Chiefs, Buffalo Bills and Green Bay Packers have had a better winning percentage in the regular season. Leaving aside one of those three teams is the one McCarthy left, it’s hard to argue with the regular season success, and there is no guarantee the next head coach could match those same results.
Who Else Could The Cowboys Have Chosen?
It’s also fair to wonder who that replacement would be. This is The Dallas Cowboys, so there would be interest just from that aura alone. Still, even in one of the better pools of available head coaching candidates we’ve seen, the Cowboys could be in a strange spot.
Would Jones want to hand this roster to a young, unproven coach like Ben Johnson or Mike Macdonald? If not, that reduces the number of candidates in this cycle.
Would the top candidates like Bill Belichick or Jim Harbaugh join a franchise with heavy involvement from ownership? Both of those coaches could seek more control and final say over the roster of their next team. If there are some ego clashes, would those coaches even be a fit?
In a way, the McCarthy mold is the perfect type of coach for this version of the Cowboys. He’s a good enough retread the team won’t bottom out during the regular season, and he needs the opportunity enough not to butt heads with ownership.
The closest we’ll get to a power struggle in Dallas is what we saw last offseason with McCarthy taking back the reins of the offense, and, again, that mostly worked.
But then the question becomes, what exactly is the role and expectation of being Cowboys head coach? Is it to be a good regular-season team and blindly hope for the best in the playoffs? Or is it to potentially raise the ceiling of this roster to reach a level that has not been seen since the Cowboys last reached the conference championship game in 1995?
A team could do worse than McCarthy is striving for the former. But we have a pretty solid sample to say he’s not the latter.
Regular Season vs. Playoffs
Using McCarthy’s regular season success to hope for better results postseason may also be futile. He’s demonstrated a pattern of being a different coach in the playoffs.
As an example, let’s take a look at his fourth downs. During the regular season — and this dates back to his time in Green Bay — McCarthy has been a fairly aggressive coach on fourth downs. This season, McCarthy was the seventh-most aggressive coach on fourth downs, according to FTN.
According to rbsdm.com, the Cowboys have been the seventh-best team in going for it when the numbers suggest they should in the regular season since McCarthy took over in 2020.
In the playoffs, albeit with a much smaller sample, McCarthy has gone from more than a 50 percent rate of going for it to just 20 percent.
This tracks back to playoff failures in Green Bay when McCarthy opted for multiple short field goals. Like the 18-yard and 19-yard tries, both on fourth-and-1, against the Seattle Seahawks in the 2014 NFC Championship Game. The Packers lost by six.
Fourth downs aren’t the most important aspect of coaching. In this case, they serve as a useful proxy for McCarthy’s struggles in high-leverage situations. It was on display when the Cowboys nearly lost a late lead against the Detroit Lions in Week 17 of this season.
How Will McCarthy, Cowboys Look In the Future?
Can McCarthy change? Maybe. In 2023, it was the most we’ve seen him shift schematically during a season. The Cowboys went from a more spread-out offense to one that ran through CeeDee Lamb at a high rate, especially in the red zone.
Yet, even some of those tendencies went stale and predictable in the biggest moments.
The Cowboys now face a pivotal offseason that will start shaping the franchise's future. Dan Quinn, one of the league’s best defensive coordinators since being hired by Dallas in 2021, might leave for a head coaching opportunity. Let’s not forget McCarthy’s first defensive coordinator hire was Mike Nolan, who oversaw the league’s sixth-worst defense by DVOA.
Lamb will need a new contract with just his 2024 $18 million fifth-year option remaining. Micah Parsons is extension-eligible after his third season. Then, most importantly, the Cowboys need to figure out what to do with Prescott.
Prescott is set for a $59 million cap hit for 2024 that includes a no-trade clause and a no-franchise tag clause. Per OverTheCap, Dallas is about $15 million over the 2024 cap. The Cowboys could easily extend him to lower that number for next season. However, the contract would average at least $50 million per year, which is where the top contracts at the position have reached.
This could be a fairly locked-in roster that was already one of the 10 oldest in the league this season by snap-weighted age.
Despite McCarthy returning, he won’t get an extension. He’ll coach 2024 in the final year of his contract. That still leaves a lot of questions about what the Cowboys are supposed to be at this moment. Maybe Jones believes the coach is a much less important factor in the team’s success than most would.
Even if coaching was a small factor, it would benefit the team to have the best at providing value in whatever slice of responsibility that is. By keeping McCarthy, the Cowboys are limiting that upside.
The Cowboys are continually surprised but if this decision leads to more playoff success and a longer McCarthy run, it might be a rare time that surprise becomes a positive for the franchise.
