Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy remains in the final year of his contract coming off a disappointing 48-32 wild-card playoff loss to the Green Bay Packers this past January.
During a recent conversation with Clarence Hill of DLLS, Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones shared that “the Green Bay thing” is one reason McCarthy has been tasked with coaching through a “lame-duck” season.
“When we lost the Green Bay game, we basically had everybody say, ‘OK, what are you going to do about this? OK, this wasn’t just a game. What are you going to do about this?‘ And so it got the attention of everything we do,” Jones said.
McCarthy’s Cowboys completed three consecutive 12-5 regular seasons through the 2023 campaign, but his squads also went 1-3 in the playoffs over that time. McCarthy acknowledged earlier this summer that working in the final season of a contract is “a challenge,” one potentially made more difficult by the fact that Dak Prescott is also in the last year of his deal because Jones reportedly isn’t yet willing to fully commit to the star quarterback on a long-term basis. Prescott is responsible for a 2-5 career postseason record.
“I don’t know that there’s any more urgency but I have tried to look at places that we are complacent or ways not to be complacent,” Jones explained. “I’m looking for ways to make sure they can’t say that I’ve got some kind of structure that breeds complacency. It can be contracts. It can be conversations. It can be player decisions.”
At this point, it would be downright silly to ignore the fact that the Cowboys are routinely mentioned as a potential landing spot for six-time Super Bowl champion head coach Bill Belichick. While Belichick will be 73 years old when training camp opens next summer, Jones turns 82 years old this fall and presumably is tired of waiting for his Cowboys to make a return to the conference championship game for the first time since they won Super Bowl XXX in January 1996.
“‘You need to make some changes,’“ Jones said about what he “heard from fans with even more emotion” following Dallas’ loss to Green Bay in January. “And I’m still hearing it. I didn’t make many changes. But within the realm of not making changes, totally changing people out, I tried to turn up the heat on myself and everybody involved. And I think that’s what’s being discussed. I think that’s why the angst was there.”
As of Wednesday morning, DraftKings Sportsbook listed the Cowboys fourth among the betting favorites at +700 odds to represent the NFC in Super Bowl LIX.
McCarthy will enter this Sunday’s regular-season opener at the Cleveland Browns knowing that anything short of the Cowboys playing in February’s title game will likely result in Jones making wholesale coaching changes during the offseason.
