Mike McCarthy is gone, but how successful can the next head coach really be?

Three decades, no Super Bowl, and Jerry Jones is the lone constant for the Cowboys. Carly May Gravley

The Mike McCarthy era is over for the Dallas Cowboys.

Five seasons, 84 regular season games, four playoff games. While his 49-35 regular season record is impressive, his single playoff win in those five seasons certainly is not.

It’s hard to know why McCarthy didn’t have more success in the postseason. Perhaps it’s connected to the utter dysfunction within the operations of the franchise from the top down, but it was time to move on, regardless of the reasons. He was given time and multiple opportunities, but in the end he failed.

Why is that? I’m so glad you asked!

McCarthy, perhaps like any head coach the Cowboys have had in recent years or will have in the future, gets unfairly compared with the ancient history of the franchise. This is a franchise that has not reached the NFC Championship Game since the 1995 season and has just five playoff wins in the last 29 years, yet has an expectant owner and fanbase for which anything less than a return to glory is deemed a failure. Every coach who comes through has the disclaimer attached to their parting of ways: “He didn’t do what Jimmy Johnson did.”

Former head coach Jimmy Johnson’s success came more than 30 years ago. Yet, despite the epic failures in the playoffs, McCarthy had the most regular season success we’ve seen around here since those glory days of the ‘90s. For the first time since a run from 1991 to 1996, this team had three consecutive seasons of double-digit wins and three consecutive playoff appearances. That’s not nothing, you know?

The natural course of a coaching tenure hit its peak last season. Year 2, make the playoffs. Year 3, win a playoff game and advance to the second round. Year 4, win the division, have the 2-seed and be set up for back-to-back home playoff games to lay out a path to advance to a conference title game. But Year 4, which included another successful regular season, ended with, in my opinion, the worst loss in franchise history to the 7 seeded Green Bay Packers in the wild card round of the playoffs last season. That, also, was not nothing. Not just another playoff loss.

I would’ve fired McCarthy after that horrendous upset. Sadly, despite the run of success in the regular season for three years, the lasting memories of his tenure will be a team that struggled with penalties and discipline and that failed in its biggest games against the best opponents. And make no mistake, the penalties have long been out of control. The Cowboys led the NFL in penalties over the last five seasons with 570. That’s 14 more than the next team, and it’s just unacceptable. The league average for the past five years was 493.

As for failures in their biggest games, let’s take a quick look. In 2021, they had a home playoff game as the third seed and lost to the San Francisco 49ers by a score of 23-17. We may remember that game as being close, but it was one in which they trailed 23-7 entering the fourth quarter, and a game in which they committed 14 penalties.

The following season was a step in the right direction with a road playoff win against Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in what would be the final game of Brady’s career. But the following week, it was yet another loss to San Francisco. This game was much closer, a 19-12 defeat on the road, but when the offense needed to score with the game on the line, down 16-9, it could only produce a field goal and a punt while the Cowboys still had a chance.

That failure led to the debacle of the 2023 playoffs. Hosting seventh-seed Green Bay, which was led by a quarterback in his first-ever playoff game, in a stadium where Dallas had won 16 straight games, the Cowboys found themselves down 27-0 before ever scoring.

Cowboys and head coach Mike McCarthy mutually agree to part ways. pic.twitter.com/5Qfvq8BbsX

— NFL (@NFL) January 13, 2025

Instead of welcoming a new regime into AT&T Stadium, Jerry Jones and the Cowboys entered the 2024 season with McCarthy playing out the final year of his contract, a rarity in the modern NFL, especially for a coach of McCarthy’s stature. Of course, the front office did him no favors with its lack of moves in the offseason, as I detailed here months ago entering the season.

But McCarthy is a coach with a Super Bowl ring. This past season marked his 18th as a head coach. He’s 13th all-time in NFL coaching wins with 174. He’s won 60.8% of the games he’s coached. The front office was asking McCarthy to prove he’s a high-level coach deserving of a new contract and, frankly, he was unable to do so.

Even when healthy, this team struggled heavily in the red zone all season long, finishing 31st in the NFL. They struggled to score, producing just 14 touchdowns in the eight games that star QB Dak Prescott started.

When you look at the totality of the five years, the reality is that McCarthy was hired to take this team further than the previous Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett had. Garrett won two playoff games in nine full seasons as the head coach, and had only one playoff win in his final five seasons. McCarthy had one playoff win in his 5 seasons. That’s not progress.

In the biggest games, against the better teams, McCarthy’s Cowboys struggled. Including the playoffs, he finished 19-27 against teams that finished the season with a record of .500 or better. In the past five seasons, the Cowboys went 10-22 against teams that finished the season with 10 or more wins. Simply put: you must be better against the best teams if that’s what you believe you are. Instead, the bulk of what they have done in recent seasons was to beat up on bad teams. The McCarthy Cowboys went 29-8 against teams that finished the season with 7 or fewer wins. And, if you’re wondering, against middle-of-the-road-teams that had either 8 or 9 wins, they went 11-8. Against average teams, that’s in no way impressive, by the way.

The Cowboys will now move on. To whom? No one knows just yet, but the list of possible hires is a colorful one for now: Deion Sanders, Jason Witten, Kellen Moore, Jon Gruden, Robert Salah and Pete Carroll are the names being thrown around the most. Is there a name that Jones would cede control to so the new coach could run things his way? I doubt it.

And does the name of the coach even matter? If the Cowboys had hired Dan Campbell in 2020 instead of McCarthy (Campbell was hired in 2021 by the Lions), would Campbell have been able to come here and operate the way he has so successfully done in Detroit to change the culture here? It’s highly doubtful.

But there is always hope that Jerry Jones can find gold again. He was sort of, indirectly, right all those years ago when he infamously told Jimmy Johnson that any one of 500 coaches could take this franchise to a Super Bowl when Barry Switzer took the team to a title in 1995. But Jones has struck out on the last six head coaches he’s hired, so the odds have improved to any one of 494!