4 January 23 - 29, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Next in Line, Please Does it even matter who the Cowboys hire next? BY MATT MCCLEARIN T he Mike McCarthy era is over for the Dallas Cowboys. Five seasons, 84 regular sea- son games, four playoff games. While his 49-35 regular season record is impressive, his single playoff win in those five seasons certainly is not. It’s hard to know why McCarthy didn’t have more success in the postseason. Per- haps it’s connected to the utter dysfunction within the operations of the franchise from the top down, but it was time to move on, re- gardless of the reasons. He was given time and multiple opportunities, but in the end he failed. Why is that? I’m so glad you asked! McCarthy, perhaps like any head coach the Cowboys have had in recent years or will have in the future, gets unfairly com- pared with the ancient history of the fran- chise. This is a franchise that has not reached the NFC Championship Game since the 1995 season and has just five play- off wins in the last 29 years, yet has an ex- pectant owner and fanbase for which anything less than a return to glory is deemed a failure. Every coach who comes through has the disclaimer attached to their parting of ways: “He didn’t do what Jimmy Johnson did.” Former head coach Jimmy Johnson’s success came more than 30 years ago. Yet, despite the epic failures in the playoffs, Mc- Carthy had the most regular season success we’ve seen around here since those glory days of the ‘90s. For the first time since a run from 1991 to 1996, this team had three con- secutive seasons of double-digit wins and three consecutive playoff appearances. That’s not nothing, you know? The natural course of a coaching tenure hit its peak last season. Year 2, make the playoffs. Year 3, win a playoff game and ad- vance to the second round. Year 4, win the division, have the 2-seed and be set up for back-to-back home playoff games to lay out a path to advance to a conference title game. But Year 4, which included another successful regular season, ended with, in my opinion, the worst loss in franchise his- tory to the 7 seeded Green Bay Packers in the wild card round of the playoffs last sea- son. That, also, was not nothing. Not just another playoff loss. I would’ve fired McCarthy after that hor- rendous upset. Sadly, despite the run of suc- cess in the regular season for three years, the lasting memories of his tenure will be a team that struggled with penalties and discipline and that failed in its biggest games against the best opponents. And make no mistake, the penalties have long been out of control. The Cowboys led the NFL in penalties over the last five seasons with 570. That’s 14 more than the next team, and it’s just unaccept- able. The league average for the past five years was 493. As for failures in their biggest games, let’s take a quick look. In 2021, they had a home playoff game as the third seed and lost to the San Francisco 49ers by a score of 23-17. We may remember that game as being close, but it was one in which they trailed 23-7 enter- ing the fourth quarter, and a game in which they committed 14 penalties. Instead of welcoming a new regime into AT&T Stadium, Jerry Jones and the Cowboys entered the 2024 season with McCarthy playing out the final year of his contract, a rarity in the modern NFL, es- pecially for a coach of McCarthy’s stature. Of course, the front office did him no fa- vors with its lack of moves in the offsea- son, as I detailed here months ago entering the season. But McCarthy is a coach with a Super Bowl ring. This past season marked his 18th as a head coach. He’s 13th all-time in NFL coaching wins with 174. He’s won 60.8% of the games he’s coached. The front office was asking McCarthy to prove he’s a high-level coach deserving of a new contract and, frankly, he was unable to do so. Even when healthy, this team struggled heavily in the red zone all season long, fin- ishing 31st in the NFL. They struggled to score, producing just 14 touchdowns in the eight games that star QB Dak Prescott started. When you look at the totality of the five years, the reality is that McCarthy was hired to take this team further than the previous Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett had. Garrett won two playoff games in nine full seasons as the head coach, and had only one playoff win in his final five seasons. McCar- thy had one playoff win in his 5 seasons. That’s not progress. In the biggest games, against the better teams, McCarthy’s Cowboys struggled. In- cluding the playoffs, he finished 19-27 against teams that finished the season with a record of .500 or better. In the past five sea- sons, the Cowboys went 10-22 against teams that finished the season with 10 or more wins. Simply put: you must be better against the best teams if that’s what you believe you are. Instead, the bulk of what they have done in recent seasons was to beat up on bad teams. The McCarthy Cowboys went 29-8 against teams that finished the season with 7 or fewer wins. And, if you’re wondering, against middle-of-the-road-teams that had either 8 or 9 wins, they went 11-8. Against average teams, that’s in no way impressive, by the way. The Cowboys will now move on. To whom? No one knows just yet, but the list of possible hires is a colorful one for now: De- ion Sanders, Jason Witten, Kellen Moore, Jon Gruden, Robert Salah and Pete Carroll are the names being thrown around the most. Is there a name that Jones would cede control to so the new coach could run things his way? I doubt it. And does the name of the coach even matter? If the Cowboys had hired Dan Campbell in 2020 instead of McCarthy (Campbell was hired in 2021 by the Lions), would Campbell have been able to come here and operate the way he has so success- fully done in Detroit to change the culture here? It’s highly doubtful. But there is always hope that Jerry Jones can find gold again. He was sort of, indi- rectly, right all those years ago when he infa- mously told Jimmy Johnson that any one of 500 coaches could take this franchise to a Super Bowl when Barry Switzer took the team to a title in 1995. But Jones has struck out on the last six head coaches he’s hired, so the odds have improved to any one of 494! Welcome to the life of a Cowboys fan, I guess. ▼ POLITICS LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE! JASMINE CROCKETT GETS ASKED TO “TAKE IT OUTSIDE” BY CONGRESSMEMBER. BY KELLY DEARMORE T he 119th Congress is barely two weeks old, but that’s plenty of time for Jasmine Crockett to make head- lines. Last week, the U.S. representative from Dallas got into a heated exchange with Nancy Mace, a congresswoman from South Carolina, during a House Oversight Com- mittee discussion of civil rights and trans- gender rights. Mace has made headlines in recent months for her hard stance against allowing trans women into the bathrooms in the U.S. Capitol following the election of Sarah McBride from Delaware, who in No- vember became the first out transgender person elected to Congress. NBC News reported that Crockett was “calling for re-establishing a subcommittee on civil rights and criticizing Mace’s rheto- ric about transgender people.” “I can see that somebody’s campaign cof- fers really are struggling right now. So [Mace] is gonna keep saying ‘trans, trans, trans, trans’ so that people will feel threat- ened, and child, listen —” Crockett said. “I am no child, do not call me a child, I am no child,” Mace interjected, prompting committee chair James Comer, R-Ky., to un- successfully call for order. “If you want to take it outside, we can do that,” Mace said, addressing Crockett. The kerfuffle rose to a level above other instances of Crockett verbally sparring with others because Mace’s words being could be seen as a physical threat, though Mace de- nied that’s what she intended. You might re- call that in 2024, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told Crockett, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading” during a House Over- sight Committee meeting. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez de- manded Greene’s words be stricken from the record, Crockett fired off a reply that launched a million memes by asking, “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling. If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach- blonde, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?” But unlike that encounter with Greene last year, Tuesday’s bout with Mace had other representatives wondering if Mace had threatened Crockett with a physical fight. “Take this outside,” is a common phrase used, at least in movies and TV shows, by people who want to start a fight. NBC News reported that Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida first ques- tioned the content of Mace’s remark, but “after some discussion, Comer ruled that Mace’s remark had not been a call to vio- lence, saying she could have been asking Crockett to go outside to ‘have a cup of cof- fee or perhaps a beer.’” | UNFAIR PARK | Mike Brooks Who will Cowboys owner Jerry Jones hire next? >> p6
