We don’t get to talk much about the Dallas Cowboys on this website. I leave that to every other pundit with nothing important to say. But it’s gotten to the point where everybody and their mother is piling on the Cowboys, so why not join in the fun.
We can blast Jerry Jones for blatantly mismanaging his roster, but it’s his team and if he wants to run it into the ground, fiddling while Rome burns, that’s entirely his prerogative.
No, this week, I’m referring specifically to Cowboys head coach, a.k.a. dead man walking, Mike McCarthy. It’s hard to come up with another figure in professional sports that is routinely placed under more scrutiny than the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. Mike McCarthy fits that bill.
Jerry Jones hired McCarthy to become the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys all the way back in 2020, which believe it or not makes him the 9th longest tenured coach in the NFL. As we all know, the NFL is a results-oriented league with five to seven coaches fired the first Monday of every post-season, so the fact that McCarthy ranks so high on the tenured list shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
Plus, he’s a football lifer with a Super Bowl victory on his resume, so that traditionally gives head coaches more of a pass (See: Doug Peterson, Jacksonville Jaguars).
After a troubling first season, Mike McCarthy went 12-5 his following three, however, it’s the post-season by which all teams and coaches are measured. Dallas’ 1-3 playoff record under McCarthy’s tenure meant the flame under that microscope has become infinitely hotter.
We can argue about where Dallas’s sense of entitlement ranks amongst NFL teams (among the highest) or how much of their current struggles fall directly on McCarthy’s shoulders (an increasingly fair amount) or even whether he’ll be back next season (he won’t) but I’d rather talk about another unnoticed seed of his demise.
Micah Parsons returned to the Cowboys’ roster after missing a month due to an ankle injury. Parsons is one of the most feared linebackers in the game. The Cowboys went 1-3 without him, although to be fair, this team wasn’t all that good with him. Regardless, Parsons is a man you want in your lineup. He’s a defensive presence that opposing offenses must account for. But even his return wasn’t enough to get Dak-less Dallas past the Philadelphia Eagles. They lost embarrassingly 34-6, falling to 3-6 on the season and a woefully winless 0-4 at home.
When it comes to Micah Parsons, Mike McCarthy and their mostly media-invented war of words, I refer not to Parsons’ comments about McCarthy’s future with the team being “above his pay grade” over which we’re making way too much of a big deal. That decision is above Parsons’ pay grade and was a question only asked for clickbait.
No, I refer to an answer that McCarthy gave in reference to Micah’s return to the active roster.
Keep in mind, this is your best defensive player who just returned from injury and someone who you’d probably want to at least keep an eye on. When asked about Parsons’ first game back, McCarthy replied…
“I don’t get to watch a whole lot of the defense. My focus is more on situations and things that are going on and off. But you definitely feel Micah’s impact when he steps on the field. So, what I saw was his pressure. You know, one time on our sideline running Jalen (Hurts) out of bounds. So, it was great to have him back out there.”
Now, I get that McCarthy is an offensive-minded coach. He was a wide receivers coach for Pittsburgh. He was a quarterbacks coach for Kansas City and Green Bay. He was an offensive coordinator in New Orleans and San Francisco. He coached both Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay.
But one would think as an NFL head coach, despite his specialties and area of focus, he’d at least pay a bit of attention to Micah Parsons upon his return. Your best player just returned from a month of rehab. You think you might want to sneak a peek. Just because he’s an offensive-minded coach doesn’t mean he should neglect the team’s defensive needs, especially when Dallas is the second worst team in the league in terms of points allowed per game. Someone should be paying attention. But that’s the problem in Dallas. The buck doesn’t stop anywhere.
Maybe Parsons’ “pay grade” comments came in response to his head coach barely noticing he was back. Maybe McCarthy is so dead man walking that he’s too shell-shocked to effectively coach a game, going over the wanted ads more than his own playbook. Maybe McCarthy is so distraught about his starting quarterback’s season-ending surgery that he’s hyper-focused on his back up and doing whatever he can to win a game, which isn’t much.
It just struck me as odd that McCarthy’s response to how Parsons played upon his return was “I don’t get to watch a whole lot of the defense.” As soon as I heard this soundbite, I did a double take wondering how this was even remotely an acceptable answer. At least lie to us, or better yet pay closer attention to one of the most glaring problems on your team.
You’re the head coach of the Dallas Fucking Cowboys, one of the most underachieving teams in the league, not only this year but ever since you took the job. You think you’d want to watch some of the defense, although who can blame him. Their defense is as unwatchable as it is laughable.
I understand that coaches have specialties and that they hire multiple staffers to focus on that part of the roster but for a head coach to say they don’t watch much of the defense only means that McCarthy is wholly out of touch with what’s going on in his own locker room. How is Parsons’ return not celebrated?
Ultimately, this inattention to detail will cost McCarthy his job. At this point, maybe that’s what he wants. He is a perfectly capable coach who will find less pressure-filled work elsewhere and who will be replaced by another coach that will inevitably be measured on a game-by-game basis. That’s what comes with the Dallas job.
Hopefully his successor will take the time to introduce himself to Micah Parsons.
That whole thing about coaches with a Super Bowl ring getting a pass…just wait to trot that line out again when the Jets hire (gasp!) Jon Gruden.
Retraction, J-Dub.
That should have read Super Bowl winning coaches who don’t call players “fags” in their company emails get a pass.