Allowing a Super Bowl-winning head coach to walk out of your building is never easy. The Dallas Cowboys had to make one of the hardest decisions of Jerry Jones' ownership when they decided not to renew McCarthy's contract before Tuesday's deadline.
This was the right move, regardless of McCarthy's pedigree and success in the NFL -- even in Dallas.
For all the good McCarthy brought the Cowboys organization, the results remained the same. Dallas isn't hoisting a Super Bowl championship nor has it reached the conference championship game under McCarthy, a franchise streak of 29 years and counting.
McCarthy won a lot in Dallas. He was the first head coach to take the Cowboys to three consecutive 12-plus-win seasons since 1993-1995, which shows how little Dallas has been winning of late.
McCarthy is one of eight active coaches with a Super Bowl title, and he has just five losing seasons in a 17-year career. His 11 playoff wins are tied for 10th most in NFL history. This is a lot of success Jones is passing up by allowing McCarthy to leave.
Playoff failures
While there has been a lot of winning in Dallas under McCarthy, the postseason has been the clear indicator of McCarthy's failures. McCarthy has just a 1-3 playoff record as the Cowboys head coach, with two of those losses coming at home in the wild-card round as the higher seed. The Cowboys are still the only No. 2 seed to lose to the No. 7 seed in the expanded playoff format, and that matchup has been played 10 times since the playoffs expanded in 2020.
The Cowboys went 36-15 in three seasons from 2021-2023, yet had just one playoff win. They are the first team to win 12-plus games in three straight seasons and fail to make the conference championship game (since the 1970 merger).
McCarthy knew how to get the Cowboys in position to go deep in the playoffs, but never accomplished the task. At the end of the day, the Cowboys were in the same place they were under Jason Garrett -- and Wade Phillips before him -- watching teams play deep into January.
This has been the true story for Dallas since its last Super Bowl championship. Winning titles hasn't been the aura of the Cowboys; instead it's been the playoff failures and the constant waiting for the roof to collapse inside the organization.
The Cowboys have 13 straight playoff appearances without reaching the conference championship game -- the longest streak in NFL history. Dallas is 5-13 in the playoffs since winning Super Bowl XXX in that 1995 season. Only the Browns, Lions, Bears, Commanders, Dolphins and Raiders have fewer playoff wins since -- and many of those franchises were the laughingstock of the NFL for the past three decades.
Cowboys structure
With so much playoff failure and the Cowboys set to enter a state of mediocrity, Jones had no choice but to move on from McCarthy. The Cowboys are actually projected to be $285,000 over the salary cap heading into this offseason (per Over The Cap), having a quarterback (Dak Prescott) with a cap number of $89.9 million for 2025 and a wide receiver (CeeDee Lamb) with a cap number of $35.5 million. Micah Parsons also needs to be signed to a massive extension, making the majority of cap space occupied by three players.
This isn't the formula for winning, and the Cowboys haven't exactly made up for it by drafting well in recent years. They aren't signing any good free agents, either, nor being wise in their hunt for free agents that can be productive under one-year deals.
The Cowboys are a team set to undergo a rebuild with a 31-year-old quarterback who can't go deep in the playoffs and a roster that is closer toward bottoming out than actually competing for a championship. Dallas is better off allowing McCarthy to pursue other head-coaching opportunities and McCarthy is in a better place not coaching a team through a rebuild.
Different directions
McCarthy's shelf life wouldn't have been long under his next contract and his opportunity to coach another franchise may have gone by the wayside. In this scenario, McCarthy is still one of the better candidates out there. Remember, he wasn't fired by the Cowboys.
Dallas needs to admit the franchise needs to rebuild, a task a coach of McCarthy's pedigree isn't suited for at this stage in his career. Perhaps a young coach can actually innovate Dallas and speed up the rebuilding process.
McCarthy and the Cowboys are just in different directions. Maybe Jones knows it as well, even if he won't publicly admit as such.
This was the right decision by Jones, even if it was the hard one.
