For one frozen moment, it doesn’t matter whether you thought the Dallas Cowboys should extend Mike McCarthy to continue as their coach, or whether you’re content with their decision to part ways with the guy who has been at the helm the past five years.
Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones has united both sides of the discourse. Whether you thought McCarthy should stay or go, most would agree the way Jones and the Cowboys reached this conclusion was lousy and unnecessary.
The questions surrounding McCarthy’s future in Dallas began swirling in October, when the Cowboys fell to 3-3 entering their bye week after a 47-9 home loss to the Detroit Lions. A little more than a month later, the Cowboys fell to 3-7, with their franchise quarterback ruled out for the season. One month later, with three games remaining in the regular season, the Cowboys were eliminated from the postseason.
This grand decision on McCarthy didn’t sneak up on the Cowboys. Jones said on his radio show before the season finale that the “hay is in the barn” as it relates to McCarthy, meaning all of the data points needed to make a decision were already on the table.
In the past, much was made about how long the Cowboys allowed the Jason Garrett situation to linger in 2019, after the Cowboys were eliminated from the playoffs on the final day of the season. Garrett was in a similar situation to McCarthy this year, in that his contract ran out upon the conclusion of the season. It took the Cowboys seven days to make the announcement on Garrett.
With McCarthy, it took eight.
There is a key difference between the situations, though. As the Cowboys kept Garrett waiting for a week, he wasn’t being restricted from another potential opportunity to be a head coach in the NFL. Last week, the Chicago Bears requested permission from the Cowboys to interview McCarthy for their vacant head-coaching position. Although McCarthy’s contract with the Cowboys expired last week, they held an exclusive negotiating window with McCarthy until Tuesday.
The Cowboys declined Chicago’s request.
That move made it seem like there was real substance to the Cowboys’ interest in bringing back McCarthy. Perhaps all of the over-the-top compliments Jones gave McCarthy the past two months in the media wasn’t just deflective.
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For six days after declining McCarthy the opportunity to speak to the Bears, the Cowboys remained silent. Other teams continued conducting coaching interviews. The New England Patriots even made their hire. Dallas did nothing, until it parted ways with McCarthy on Monday.
The optics are terrible.
In all the praise Jones showered on McCarthy in the past few months, one key underlying element was the respect he has for McCarthy. Jones spoke to the respect he has for McCarthy’s resume, his coaching acumen, who he is as a person and how the coach kept the team from completely unraveling after the season went off the rails.
For all of that respect Jones spoke about, he handled McCarthy’s departure in about as disrespectful of a way as possible.
McCarthy’s prospects for another job should be fine. He can now speak to the Bears. The New Orleans Saints are reportedly interested in McCarthy and still conducting their search. The Patriots were never really on the table for McCarthy.
The real loser in all of this is the Cowboys.
By keeping McCarthy dangling for over a week, the Cowboys are a week behind other teams searching for a coach. They could have held interviews with staffers from the top-seeded Detroit Lions and Kansas City Chiefs. That includes hot names in Lions coordinators Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn. If they had interviewed them last week, the Cowboys could have spoken to them again after conference championship weekend. If both teams go the distance, the Cowboys can now speak to them after the Super Bowl, at the earliest.
Although historically it’s unlikely the Cowboys would be legitimately interested in first-time head-coaching hires like Johnson or Glenn, the opportunity to exhaust all options by having those conversations would be optimal. The Cowboys no longer have that.
The other thing to consider is how the Cowboys’ handling of McCarthy’s departure makes the operations in Dallas look to candidates. Jones is not one to care much, if at all, about how others perceive his methods of doing business, so it probably doesn’t matter to him. And in all reality, this bungled moment is likely to be a blip on the radar and will do little to rust the shine of what is the allure of being the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.
But when the Bears requested permission to speak to McCarthy, ESPN’s Marcus Spears, who played for nearly a decade in Dallas, said this about McCarthy.
“You would be shocked at how much respect Mike McCarthy has in this league,” Spears said. “And how many people think he’s a really good head coach, and how he sets the temperature of a locker room. … I didn’t know much about how the league — it’s really about how your peers talk about you. It’s really about how guys in the coaching profession, general managers, players that played for you. That’s the biggest kudos to what you’ve been able to do. I know this, living in Dallas, them dudes like Mike McCarthy a lot. There’s a high level of respect for him in that locker room.”
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That respect for McCarthy — who he is, as a man, and how he carries himself — isn’t hard to detect. Dak Prescott expressed that sentiment many times, as have McCarthy’s assistants and other players. Even Jones has talked about it at length. That doesn’t mean the Cowboys had to continue on with McCarthy and that parting ways wasn’t the right decision. But when a coach as decorated and respected as McCarthy gets handled the way he did by the Cowboys in the past week, it could raise flags, including of those who might be future candidates. In the end, there are only 32 of these jobs and it is the Cowboys. But the past week doesn’t help. It was avoidable and unnecessary.
In a statement, Jones expressed that the decision to part ways was a mutual one both sides arrived at independently. Jones said the past week featured “thorough” discussions about the past season and the “road forward for the team.” Though that might seem like a legitimate excuse, Jones knows how quickly things move in the NFL, and there was ample time for these discussions to happen earlier and to do right by McCarthy by getting to a resolution sooner.
In the past year, the Cowboys made the situation uncomfortable for McCarthy. They allowed him to coach on an expiring deal. They didn’t give him a formidable roster for his lame-duck season. Moving on from McCarthy would have been an understandable decision after last season — it’s an understandable decision now. But the way the Cowboys went about it makes no sense and leaves a sour taste as they move forward to find the guy who can end the three-decade championship drought.
(Top photo: Eric Hartline / Imagn Images)
