Hold your horses, Coach Prime. Mike McCarthy hasn’t packed his bags just yet.
During his weekly appearance on 105.3 “TheFan,” Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said he wasn’t convinced his head coach was going to be shown the door once his contract expires at the end of the 2024 season.
“I don’t think [extending his contract] is crazy at all,” Jones said. “This is a Super Bowl-winning coach. Mike McCarthy has been there and done that. He has great ideas.
“Bottom line is that, [in] no place in my body language or anything else have you seen indications about what we’re going to be doing relative to this [coaching] staff at the end of this year. And we shouldn’t [decide yet]. We got a lot of football left.”
Now in his fifth season leading America’s Team, McCarthy has accumulated a record of 46-32 and a winning percentage of .590.
That’s not a fantastic mark, but it’s not entirely representative of the coach who led Dallas to three straight 12-win seasons between 2021 and 2023, either.
At the same time, and though his Cowboys reached the playoffs in each of those seasons, they’ve won only one postseason game during McCarthy’s tenure.
In 2021, Dallas dropped its wild-card matchup to the 49ers. In 2022, the Niners bested Dallas again in the Divisional series.
And in 2023, despite the widely held belief that they were ready to take the next step, the Cowboys failed to make it out of the wild card round as the Jordan Love-led Packers blew them out of the water, 48-32.
So here we are, with less than two months remaining in a 2024 season that has been absolutely, unequivocally abysmal.
For McCarthy, now in the final year of the five-year deal he signed in 2020, the timing is certainly inopportune.
Dallas has dropped seven of its 11 games thus far. Playoffs are a pipe dream. The franchise quarterback is out for the season.
What’s more, franchise legend Michael Irvin recently fanned the flames of a Deion Sanders-Cowboys union.
All eyes are on 2025. Jones’ included.