Dallas Cowboys: Mike McCarthy is no puppet for Jerry Jones

Mike McCarthy is no puppet for Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

For years, the term puppet has been thrown around when discussing the Dallas Cowboys head coaching job. It’s just the way it goes — with an overly talkative owner such as Jerry Jones putting his hands in everything, the assumption has always been that he’s pulling the strings on his little marionette who simply sits there waiting to be blamed when things go wrong.

For 10 seasons, this was the case with Jason Garrett. It wasn’t true as the team changed drastically under Garrett’s watch — even though not all was for the better. His fingerprints were all over everything but he was continually still called a puppet.

There were also those who felt the coaching search would be hampered by Gepetto sitting in the owner’s box. And then when they hired a top-tier coach with a Super Bowl ring, there were even more whispers with the question popping up asking why Mike McCarthy was ready to come into a situation where Jones would be pulling the strings.

However, with two weeks to go until the 2020 NFL regular season it has become abundantly clear that McCarthy is no puppet. He’s been making several changes and while some have been small (such as the quarterbacks wearing red jerseys for the first time in recent memory), Sunday’s move was not.

The Dallas Cowboys were set to air their live scrimmage and there’s no one who follows football that doesn’t realize how much Jerry Jones loves to market things. And with no preseason, this scrimmage would have been a great chance for him to do exactly that — but McCarthy didn’t allow it.

Sure, they did televise the practice but no live plays were shown. Instead, we heard Michael Irvin and company talk about the action. Not only that, but McCarthy took numbers and names off the jerseys, making it harder to distinguish the players.

The reason for this was simple, he wanted to hide his younger players. McCarthy said as much according to Jon Machota, who said he didn’t want other teams coming in and stealing his potential practice squad players.

Really, it’s a stroke of brilliance. Year after year, teams waive players to cut their roster to 53 and other clubs come in and claim them for themselves. That’s going to be much more difficult now as the tape on these players is going to be incredibly difficult to discern.

Even with is being smart, it cost Jones some marketability of his team. Not that this will hurt him since he still runs the richest franchise in the league but it just proves that McCarthy is running the team. He’s no puppet. No matter how much everyone wants him to be.