Mike McCarthy will be back for another season with the Dallas Cowboys
FRISCO – Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy is staying with the team despite another short-lived playoff run.
This comes after the team lost in the Wild-Card Round to the No. 7 Green Bay Packers at home, 48-32.
Now Dallas is looking at 29 years since the franchise's last trip to the NFC championship game. It was the 1995 season when the Cowboys won their fifth Super Bowl title.
Dallas Cowboys Owner, President and General Manager Jerry Jones released the following statement regarding his decision:
"I believe this team is very close and capable of achieving our ultimate goals and the best step forward for us will be with Mike McCarthy as our head coach. There is great benefit to continuing the team's progress under Mike's leadership as our head coach. Specifically, there are many layers of success that have occurred this season as a result of Mike's approach to leading the team, both with individual players and with our team collectively. Mike has the highest regular season winning percentage of any head coach in Cowboys history and we will dedicate ourselves, in partnership with him, to translating that into reaching our post-season goals. Certainly, Mike's career has demonstrated post-season success at a high level, and we have great confidence that can continue.
Further, our loss on Sunday is shared by everyone here, not just Coach McCarthy. Our players. Our coaches. Our front office. Myself. There is accountability for our results. I am accountable for our results. The lens we use to view and evaluate Coach McCarthy is holistic. While we're all disappointed with the result on Sunday and with our playoff record, I am 100 percent supportive of him as our head coach and ability to reach our goals.
We will start our process of review and decision-making regarding everything that impacts our team and roster and, while we're not going to address specific players and extensions or free agents at this point, it deserves our deepest review and consideration, and it will get it."
The Cowboys surged to the NFC East title by overtaking freefalling Philadelphia, the defending division and conference champion, in the final two weeks of the regular season.
Suddenly, Dallas had a chance to host a divisional game after a wild-card victory for the first time since that 1995 season after finishing the regular season with a 16-game home winning streak.
Dallas is the first No. 2 seed to lose to the last team in at No. 7 since the playoffs expanded to the 14-team format in 2020.
Meanwhile, the team has 14 free agents who will enter the market when it opens on March 13. That includes Tyron Smith, Tony Pollard and Stephon Gilmore. All are set to be unrestricted free agents.
McCarthy's time in Dallas got off to a rocky start as the pandemic hit just two months after he was hired. The team stumbled to a 6-10 record in 2020. The Dallas defense gave up the second most points per game in franchise history.
In his second season, McCarthy righted the ship with the hiring of Defensive Coordinator Dan Quinn and the drafting of perennial Pro Bowl Edge Rusher Micah Parsons. The Cowboys won the NFC East with a 12-5 record in 2021 but fell to the 49ers, 23-17, in a Wild Card playoff gamlethale.
In 2022, McCarthy's team went 12-5 for the second straight season, winning a Wild Card Playoff game, 31-14, over Tom Brady and the Buccaneers in Tampa before losing again to the 49ers, 19-12, in the Divisional Playoff.
After Dak Prescott led the league in interceptions that season, McCarthy fired Offensive Coordinator Kellen Moore and took over the play calling this season. Prescott engineered the highest-scoring offense in the league, leading the NFL with 36 touchdown passes with just 9 interceptions. All-Pro Wide Receiver Cee Dee Lamb led the league with 135 receptions.
The Cowboys won 7 of 9 games down the stretch to surpass the slumping Eagles and win the NFC East with a 3rd straight 12-5 record. It was the first time a Cowboys team had posted three straight 12-win seasons since the franchise's championship teams of the 90s.
However, the Cowboys' Super Bowl hopes came crashing down like never before in the postseason. Ironically enough, it was McCarthy's former team, the Packers, who dealt the lethal blow Dallas' playoff run with a humiliating 48-32 blowout upset in Jerry's own stadium, where the Cowboys had won 16 games in a row.
