With the Super Bowl over a new season can finally begin. More than a week before the Super Bowl itself, the coaching carousel finally stopped spinning. All seven openings were filled. Most of these teams should be in a better place this upcoming year because of the coaching change. A new hire can bring life into a dormant organization and revitalize players. However, what is less documented is when teams hold on to a coach for too long.
If hiring a new coach can lift a team from the heap, then keeping a coach that probably needs to go can tank one. The Los Angeles Chargers are a perfect example. Brandon Staley was a widely criticized coach and in the 2022 playoffs he presided over a team that blew a 27-point lead to the Jacksonville Jaguars. Staley had arguably already underachieved considering the immense talent present on the Chargers roster. He should have been fired following this game, there really is no excuse for blowing a 27-point lead, let alone one in the playoffs. However, that is not what the Chargers did. They kept Staley and by all accounts were a disappointment this season. They finished 5-12 and Staley was eventually fired following a 63-21 drubbing courtesy of the Las Vegas Raiders.
If I were Jerry Jones, I would have filed this away but clearly, he did not. Mike McCarthy has drawn similar criticism and frankly, has underperformed as the Dallas Cowboys coach. While over the last three seasons McCarthy has gone 12-5 in each, the playoffs are where his team’s fall short. McCarthy has only one playoff win over this time and not a single NFC title game appearance. This year was McCarthy’s magnum opus of playoff failure as the Cowboys were thrashed 48-32 by a Packers team whose quarterback was playing in his first career playoff game.
Almost everything was in the Cowboy’s favor coming into the game. They were seven-point favorites, the home team, and far more experienced, yet the Cowboys were throttled from the jump. This loss should have been cause to fire McCarthy, yet Jones stuck by his coach. The Cowboys are wasting time and in a league whose acronym can stand for “Not For Long”. Any team, let alone the Dallas Cowboys, cannot afford to let the years tick by under a mediocre coach.
This is made ten times worse considering the coaches who were available for hire. Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll are both older coaches, who granted, may be past their prime but are undeniably still solid coaches. The real gem that Dallas missed out on is Mike Vrabel. Vrabel is already seen as one of the best coaches in the NFL and even though his teams lacked top-to-bottom talent, he consistently was able to overachieve and post respectable records.
Perhaps the only red flag if you are the Cowboys is that the reason Vrabel was fired was due to his feuding with the front office. Jones is a notoriously hands-on owner and there is the chance that the two would butt heads, but what do the Cowboys have to lose?
The Cowboys have been stuck in neutral for a minute now. The last time they made it the NFC title game, let alone the Super Bowl, was nearly 30 years ago. For being “America’s Team” there really hasn’t been much to boast about. Sure, the Cowboys may continue to have good regular season showings, but their core identity must change for the Cowboys to return to their winning ways.
Firing McCarthy and hiring Vrabel would have been a good start. Vrabel isn’t a perfect coach, nor am I proclaiming him to be one, but Vrabel is a different flavor than McCarthy. He gets players to buy-in and that matters in the NFL. Maybe the Jones’ need some pushback, maybe Vrabel’s opinion should be seen as a positive rather than a negative. The Cowboys needed to do something and chose to do nothing, and that will likely result in another ill-fated Cowboys season, one that ends too early in the playoffs.
