Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy is entering his fifth season with the organization and has led the team to three straight playoff appearances, however, even more success might be necessary if he hopes to keep his role with the team after the upcoming season.
McCarthy is in the final season of a five-year contract he signed with the Cowboys in 2020, and the organization has yet to extend it, indicating that certain decision-makers would like to see even more success from him during the 2024 season.
The former Green Bay Packers head coach has put together an impressive regular season record of 42-25 during his time in Dallas while also winning the NFC East division in 2021 and 2023.
However, the Cowboys have advanced to the Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs just one time and have an overall playoff record of 1-4.
The Cowboys’ most recent playoff loss came against Green Bay in the wild-card round. The Packers took a 27-0 lead in the first half before sending Dallas home with an embarrassing 48-32 loss.
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said this loss forced him to enter the offseason with a different approach, and he has spent the past few months evaluating “ways not to be complacent.”
“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, … ‘you need to make some changes.’ And I’m still hearing it. I didn’t make many changes,” he explained, as reported by DLLS.
“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,” he said.
Although many are concerned about the Cowboys’ potential playoff success this coming season, McCarthy would prefer that his team focus on maintaining its consistent success in the regular season while dealing with the postseason as those games come.
“We keep talking about playoffs and things like that, but I don’t know when the hell it became easy to win 12 games in a season. So we really got to get back to winning week in and week out,” he said, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.
This ongoing saga is nothing new from a Cowboys organization that allowed former head coach Jason Garrett to enter the 2019 season without an extension, instead choosing to let him play out his contract before the franchise made any commitments.
Before the 2019 season, Garrett had led the Cowboys to a 10-6 season and made the playoffs in three of the previous five years but still failed to pick up any sustainable playoff success.
Jones spoke during the 2019 offseason about Garrett’s lack of an extension and confidently said that he expected his head coach to return in the future.
“There’s no secret that the guy to my right here, I want [him] to be the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys for as long as I’m around to spell it,” Jones said. “And that’s no secret, and many of you have written about it in various ways. Let’s see what’s ahead.”
The Cowboys finished that season with a record of only 8-8, and Garrett was fired shortly after the season ended, paving the way for McCarthy to step in as the organization’s head coach.
McCarthy will now look to avoid a similar fate as Dallas enters the 2024 season with Super Bowl expectations, meaning he will have to find success in both the regular season and postseason to secure his long-term future.
The former Super Bowl Champion has rarely discussed his contract situation because, according to McCarthy, “there’s really nothing to talk about because it doesn’t matter.”
“I can’t stand up in front of a group of men and consistently, on a daily basis, demand that they focus their time and energy on winning, and then I’m up here talking about things that have nothing to do with winning. So, I guess that’s how I deal with it,” he added, according to Essentially Sports.