McCarthy has to win a Super Bowl to stop the questions about his future in Dallas | You Pod to Win the Game
Yahoo Sports Charles Robinson, Jori Epstein and Charles McDonald discuss the never ending chatter about the job security for the head coach of the Cowboys. Is it Super Bowl or bust for McCarthy? Hear the full conversation on the You Pod to Win the Game podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen.
Video Transcript
[CROWD CHEERING]
CHARLES ROBINSON: The truth is, no matter how good it is, it's always-- the conversation is always there. The fire Mike conversation or the who's going to replace Mike conversation. It doesn't matter how good you are. They could win every single game, they lose the first game in the playoffs, it's like, OK, get Sean Payton on the phone. Like, are we going to do this? Can we agree that he's never going to escape this unless he wins a Super Bowl? Like Jori, right? Like, there's no way we're getting out of this.
JORI EPSTEIN: Yeah, look. There are times in Mike McCarthy's tenure here in Dallas where I felt like the issues were pretty closely related to him. When you're leading the league in penalties-- not for a game-- but for the entire season--
CHARLES ROBINSON: Totally fair.
JORI EPSTEIN: --when you're not spiking the ball properly in a playoff game, when you're regularly having 12 men on the field a week. I mean, I got to the point where I was tweeting out like obnoxiously like, oh, check that off your bingo card. They have 12 men on the field again, because they couldn't get the simple things like substitutions correct. I didn't feel that way in this Green Bay game. This was a team that was up 14 points in the fourth quarter and then they just let Aaron Rodgers pick them apart, OK? Yes, Mike didn't do that. He's not on the field. Mike's not on the field having those penalties in overtime.
He was the one who said to go for it in overtime. He said he told them that on second down. Again, we could talk about the play calls, as you said. I didn't feel like that was the case. But like you said, after the game, in the locker room, Jerry Jones was asked, like, do you have less confidence in Mike McCarthy in the long term now? And I think that's a question for January. I mean, they needed to win that game, and as I wrote in my column this weekend, like, the Cowboys just kind of, in those games, remind me that they're rarely awful but almost always mediocre and they just don't know how to take that next step.
And Dak talked about it. He's like, we needed to lay the next brick on the foundation here and we didn't. And it's like, that foundation has held strong but not advanced in years. I mean, I've been around this team six, seven years. So I do think he's not going to shake that, but I don't think it's as warranted as this year, particularly when you think about the number of games they won with Cooper Rush at quarterback. What do you think CMAC? You've seen bad coaching and bad teams. You've also spent a lot of time studying the good stuff. You get the advanced analytics. Tell us what's going through your mind.
CHARLES MCDONALD: Look, I think that-- first of all, I think that game against Green Bay was kind of weird. Like, I still feel like Cowboys are much better team than the Packers. I know that that was a bad game for them, but like, if Malik Hooker just remembers how to play football on like two plays, then they're probably in a better spot. Like today, I don't even know if we're having this conversation in the same manner. But look, I think it's hard to argue against like what Mike McCarthy has been able to accomplish in his NFL career.
Like, it's a lot of wins. I know there's a lot of good players, but shoot, look at the Raiders right now. Like, there are teams with good players that fail to win all the time. But I think it's-- I think with Mike McCarthy, people are just like, OK, well, it kind of feels stale after a while. Maybe we just want to try something different. But look, all his faults with all maybe the game management things, like the guy clearly knows how to get at least an offense going in the right direction.
I think that's a fair assessment of him, but I think it's also fair, too, when people kind of get tired of like, OK, we need something different after a while. And I think, you know, like Matt LaFleur, he was a good switch up for the Packers to move on from Mike McCarthy. But at the same time, I think Mike McCarthy has undeniably been a solid hire for Dallas and they just had like a weird slip-up on Sunday.