Mike McCarthy said this week that he has a 21-game plan for the Cowboys, laying it out in a team meeting as he does before every season. That plan might have to come to fruition for the coach to return for a sixth season in Dallas.
The Cowboys didn’t fire McCarthy after last season’s postseason fiasco, a 48-32 home loss to the Packers in the wild-card round. Neither did they give him an extension after a third consecutive 12-win regular season, a first for the organization since the 1990s.
The Cowboys’ entire coaching staff and more than 30 players, including quarterback Dak Prescott, are in the final year of their deals.
Multiple times Jones has mentioned the Green Bay loss as the reason he didn’t extend McCarthy’s contract.
“I admit this, the Green Bay thing,” Jones told Clarence Hill of DLLS. “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.”
McCarthy has admitted the “challenge” of being a lame-duck coach, but Jones doesn’t see it that way. Jones has turned up the heat on everyone in the organization, believing that the “angst and pressure” of being in a contract year will bring out their best.
“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 said. “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. . . . But here’s the overall thing I have heard from fans with even more emotion, after the Green Bay game and still hearing from [them], ‘You need to make some changes.’ 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.”
The only coach with more regular-season wins the past three years than McCarthy is Andy Reid, but the Chiefs coach has two Super Bowl championships in that span. McCarthy has one playoff win.
“He’s one of the one’s,” Jones said of McCarthy. “He relates to players and the players relate with him as well as anybody that I’ve been around, coach or otherwise, whether in my college or professional life. He has a special understanding of our pro game. He’s certainly been schooled and indoctrinated in the NFL. He has very good credentials. He’s done it. I like his game day management. I personally am impressed with his game day management, and he’s a very hard worker. He’s a Super Bowl winning coach. I can see why.”
But Jones, as General Manager, did little to help the roster this offseason. The Cowboys did next to nothing in free agency and only last week signed receiver CeeDee Lamb to a long-term extension after a prolonged holdout.
So, McCarthy is on the hot seat this season to do more with less.