Now that Manchester United's latest ex-coach Erik ten Hag has been finally been deposed as the world's meest verslagen piñata (that's "most beaten piñata" for our non-Dutch readership), the new leader in the field of hanging from the rafters and swinging tortuously from side to side is Dallas Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy. There is nobody else even close.
It wasn’t so long ago that we had Robert Saleh, Sheldon Keefe, Christie Sides, and Pedro Grifol. All had high-profile jobs and higher-profile stars—Saleh had the New York Jets and Aaron Rodgers, Keefe had the Toronto Maple Leafs and Auston Matthews, Sides had the Indiana Fever and Caitlin Clark, and Grifol had the Chicago White Sox and, uh, Corey Julks, but also this year’s White Sox were an outlier’s outlier, and so deserve mention all the same.
But Ten Hag and McCarthy have been the most enduring kick-me sign wearers of them all for nearly their entire tenures in two of the biggest jobs in pro sports. To United's credit, their board of meddlers waited until all the pundits in England had resigned themselves to Ten Hag staying on until Christmas before cutting the cord. That move is being covered elsewhere in your daily Unemploymentfector.
McCarthy, though, remains in place for the foreseeable future, because the Dallas Cowboys operate and exist entirely at the whim of Jerry Jones, and Jerry has owned McCarthy as his choice and stayed with him through four years and change as proof of Jones’s dirigible-sized worth as a football evaluator. McCarthy was roundly punked over his last seven years in Green Bay because he only won one Super Bowl, and has been even more mercilessly throttled since going to Dallas, where he has won even fewer meaningful games.
Why? In Green Bay, it might have been as simple as running afoul of Rodgers, who is now demonstrating his talent for getting his own back. Maybe now it's because McCarthy is viewed as Jerry's latest tool. Maybe it's because his playoff record is 11-11 and people think the Packers and Cowboys deserve more, even though they have been demonstrably the best team only twice. Maybe it's because the one year McCarthy had the team with the best record, 2011, he lost in the divisional round to a 9-7 Giants team that went on to win the Super Bowl. Maybe it's just a simple and superficial matter of image—McCarthy looks like Irish Santa Claus, and people find that confusing.
Whatever the case, McCarthy has lasted 18 years in the two jobs he has held and has won more than 60 percent of his games, which under normal conditions (see: Mike Tomlin) would be Hall of Fame bait. If nothing else, McCarthy should enjoy the daily peace of mind that Tomlin has, a security that comes with being better at his difficult job than just about anyone else would be. Instead, he has had to develop a flame-retardant seater for all the is-this-the-week-Jerry-finally-snaps speculation, after all the years of is-this-the-week-Rodgers-finally-convinces-the-Packers-board-to-whack-this-doughy-nincompoop experience.
And now with Ten Hag gone after only 128 games (including 72 wins and 20 draws), McCarthy is finally the elite of the elite in that rarest of categories: coach who has spent the longest time clamped into a hot seat. At this point there is no quitting for McCarthy, or any dignified withdrawal to spend time with the family. He has to coach each week until Jerry releases and scapegoats him, or scapegoats and releases him depending on your worldview.
It is not coincidental that Manchester United and the Cowboys are the most financially powerful teams in their respective sports, and so find themselves dragged onto the national stage more often. Results have little to do with this: United has been a disappointment for a decade now, and the Cowboys have been national bullshitters since Barry Switzer won the team’s last Super Bowl with Jimmy Johnson's players. Both teams have not played to their reputations or justified their profiles, or even really come close. They are nevertheless treated like royalty—which, if you remember that Prince Andrew is royalty, tells us what royalty is actually worth.
But all weird things must come to an end, and Ten Hag's end came at a moment when it was presumed he was safe. McCarthy, too, is in perpetual peril—and atop a team that looks, for the time being, pretty profoundly lost—but working for someone who hates admitting mistakes, if Jones putting McCarty in charge of piloting his ghost yacht was indeed a mistake. It is hard to imagine any coach who could countenance Jones running the football operation as he does; Smirkin' Bill Belichick would not last more than two years taking rather than giving orders. Bill Parcells, who begat Belichick, barely lasted four, and he was 62 when he got hired, not Belichick's 72.
So it is probably safe to assume that even a desultory performance like Dallas’s Sunday night showing in Santa Clara will not endanger McCarthy any more than he already was. Jones has fired only one coach midseason, that being Wade Phillips, whom he exchanged in 2010 for the eminently less qualified Jason Garrett—who got the next 10 years, despite never winning anything of note. In this way, McCarthy should probably go to Canton solely for maintaining his self-respect when all around him were losing theirs in him.
But check back with us in a couple of hours. If Jerry doesn't vent his frustration from being shown on TV all Sunday night eating his liver out and get those radio schlubs fired first, he might forget how long and how deeply he has loved his own personal Santa. Hey, everyone should have one.
