Mike McCarthy will replace Jason Garrett as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, and the resume he brings to the table is, well, impressive. McCarthy went 125-77-2 in Green Bay and made the playoffs in nine of his 13 seasons with the Packers. He played in four NFC Championship games and won a Super Bowl.
Not bad.
“I think it’s a pretty solid hire,” The Ticket in Dallas host Bob Sturm said on Ferrall on the Bench. “Were there better ideas out there? Maybe, maybe not. They did go through a long process. In the end, I think the Cowboys did really, really well – except they probably waited somewhere between one and seven years too many on Jason Garrett.”
Garrett went 85-67 from 2010 to 2019 and missed the playoffs in six of his last nine seasons.
“Jerry Jones, for all of his faults, is loyal beyond belief,” Sturm said. “In this case, you could argue Jason Garrett was a de facto Jones son, and it was just super, super difficult for Jerry, who kind of thought he might have his own Tom Landry – which certainly seemed ridiculous very early in Garrett’s career. But he just wanted it to work so badly. He wanted it to work because he really liked Garrett, he wanted it to work because Garrett was a Cowboy as a player, but he also wanted it to work so he could kind of say he did it his way.”
While Jones won three Super Bowls in the 1990s, many Cowboys fans believe Jimmy Johnson was the mastermind behind those teams. Jones, 77, doesn’t like that.
“Ever since then, he’s spent 25 years trying to prove (he) had as much to do with this as Jimmy,” Sturm said. “But that was 1995. It’s been 24 seasons where this team has not even made it to a NFC title game. He wanted this Jason Garrett hire to be the one that made all the sense.”
Instead, the Cowboys will turn to McCarthy, who won Super Bowl XLV at AT&T Stadium.
“It certainly helps for this particular job if you win the Super Bowl at their stadium,” Sturm said. “It also helps that you spent the last 10 years kind of eliminating the Cowboys and beating the Cowboys in big games. Whether it was Tony Romo at quarterback or Dak Prescott at quarterback, Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy had their way with this Cowboys franchise on a number of occasions. Heck, Matt Flynn won a big game at Cowboys Stadium in 2013.
“I think McCarthy is a real solid hire,” Sturm continued. “Obviously this Cowboys team underachieved, and I promise you if McCarthy was the coach of this thing in 2019, there is no doubt in my mind that they were in the playoffs. But it didn’t happen. The Cowboys waited on Garrett and Rod Marinelli and that defense for way too long. They kind of wasted a lot of real solid years, and now they’re going to try to fix this thing in 2020. We’ll see where it goes, but I like the hire.”