Mike McCarthy Retained: Should the Cowboys Have Fired Him?

The Dallas Cowboys suffered yet another playoff exit at the hands of the Mike Shanahan coaching tree. Last Sunday’s home loss to the Green Bay Packers brought McCarthy’s playoff record with the Cowboys to 1-3 and his overall playoff record to 11-11. But despite the head coach’s obvious shortcomings, team owner Jerry Jones has decided to honor the final year of McCarthy’s contract, which will almost certainly also end embarrassingly. So should the Dallas Cowboys have fired Mike McCarthy? If there were any doubts before last Sunday’s game, there shouldn’t have been many after.

Mike McCarthy Retained: Should the Cowboys Have Fired Him?

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McCarthy pulled out every trick in the book to lose that game. Instead of running the football on first, second or third down, McCarthy passed it three times. Two of the passes were completed and forced Detroit timeouts, but the final pass, which came on 3rd and 14, was a short throw to tight end Jake Ferguson that went for only eight yards, forcing the Cowboys to kick a field goal and giving the Lions 1:41—and an extra 40 seconds—to work with. The Lions responded by roasting Dallas’ mostly prevent-based defenses to score what should’ve been a game-winning touchdown but for one of the worst officiating blunders in NFL history.

Similar blunders stain McCarthy’s resume. In this year’s playoff game versus the Green Bay Packers, McCarthy chose to kick an extra point while trailing by 26. A two-point conversion would’ve closed the gap to 24. Despite marketing himself as an “analytics guy” to team owner Jerry Jones before his hiring, McCarthy chose to settle for a four-score game as opposed to a three-score game. Appropriately, kicker Brandon Aubrey missed the mostly meaningless PAT.

Last Sunday wasn’t the first time McCarthy settled for a sub-optimal outcome. In a 2011 regular-season game against the New York Giants, McCarthy’s Green Bay Packers kicked an extra point after scoring a touchdown to go up by eight points, not nine, with less than five minutes remaining. His decision allowed the Giants to tie the game with a touchdown and a two-point conversion on the subsequent drive. McCarthy caught flak for the decision then but could play it off because of the win. His Packers would finish the regular season with a 15-1 record before losing to the same Giants by 37-20 in the Divisional Round.

McCarthy’s poor decision-making was also in the news after Dallas’ last playoff loss to the 49ers. Trailing by 16-9 with 11:03 left in the game, McCarthy chose to kick a field goal on 4th and 8 from San Francisco’s 25-yard line. The 49ers then worked just under eight minutes off the clock before kicking a field goal of their own, wiping away the minimal advantage McCarthy had gained from kicking in the first place.

Things only got worse from there. The Cowboys got the ball back with 3:04 left, failed to gain any yards on three plays, and punted with 2:05 left on the clock. When the Cowboys eventually got the ball back again with 0:45 remaining, the Cowboys advanced to their 24-yard line before the now-infamous Ezekiel Elliott at center play led to an eight-yard completion in bounds as time expired.

Similar questions about McCarthy’s decision-making arose after Dallas’ previous playoff loss to the San Francisco 49ers. The Cowboys were trailing 23-17 with 0:32 remaining in that contest. They put together a solid drive to the San Francisco 41-yard line with 0:14 left. But then, on 2nd and 1, the Cowboys called a designed run up the middle for Prescott, and, although he gained 17 yards, time expired before he could spike the ball to stop the clock.

To be fair, McCarthy did make some changes following Dallas’ second postseason loss to the 49ers. He decided to part ways with offensive coordinator Kellen Moore, formerly a backup quarterback for the Cowboys, and replace him with Brian Schottenheimer—but McCarthy himself would be calling the plays, leaving no one for McCarthy to blame but himself after Dallas’ early exit this season.

So should the Cowboys have fired Mike McCarthy? The 2023 season’s failures fall squarely on his shoulders. Although this campaign didn’t come to an end on an embarrassing play in Santa Clara, it arguably came to a worse end: a blowout loss in front of the home crowd in a game that never felt close. But instead of the poetic ending to McCarthy’s career that his loss to the Packers—the team with which he won a single Super Bowl while coaching Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers—should’ve been, we’ll get a lame-duck campaign from him in 2024.

Bravo, Jerry Jones.