News recently broke that Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy would return for the 2024 NFL Season. This is a truly baffling decision. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That applies to every avenue of life, including sports. After three-straight years of winning 12 games in the regular season and showing poor playoff performances, the Cowboys are somehow still sticking with Mike McCarthy in 2024.
The Cowboys have not advanced past the Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs since the mid-90s, before some of you were even born, including myself. Every year that the Cowboys make the postseason, the jokes start about how they won't do well, and that was the case this year, as the upstart Green Bay Packers walked into Jerry World and dismantled the talented Cowboys.
And after yet another disappointing postseason exit in the Mike McCarthy tenure, Jerry Jones is still going to bring him back in 2024. When you look at McCarthy as a regular season head coach, he boasts a very strong record. He's gone 42-25 in the regular season with the Cowboys, which is one of the best records in the NFL over the last four seasons. Heck, he is average 10.5 wins per season.
However, the Cowboys are 1-3 in the postseason under McCarthy, clearing hitting a ceiling when the playoffs begin. And each year, their exit from the postseason is the same type of ugly, disappointing performance. In the NFL, teams will not win Super Bowls without taking HUGE risks to some degree.
There are a ton of examples of this in recent memory. The Buffalo Bills made it to the postseason in 2017 with Tyrod Taylor as the starting QB. They rightly recognized that Taylor was not going to lead them to a Super Bowl, so they took a risk in drafting Josh Allen in 2018. The Kansas City Chiefs went 50-26 during the Alex Smith era, but it became clear that Smith was not quite good enough to lead KC to a Super Bowl, so they moved on from him for Patrick Mahomes.
The Denver Broncos went 46-18 when John Fox was their head coach during the 2012-2014 seasons. However, a 3-4 playoff record was simply not good enough, so they moved on from Fox and won a Super Bowl in the next season with Gary Kubiak as the head coach. The Dallas Cowboys have clearly hit a ceiling with their own head coach, and bringing him back for yet another season is truly insane.
And this is especially true when you look at guys like Mike Vrabel and Bill Belichick being free agents. Both Vrabel and Belichick would have been upgrades over McCarthy and have shown, in their own ways, the ability to win tough games with their respective rosters. I think if Jerry Jones was serious about winning, he would have parted ways with McCarthy and shot for the moon for a potential upgrade at head coach.