Last week, when not-yet-former-coach Mike McCarthy was denied permission by the Dallas Cowboys to speak to the Chicago Bears about their own perpetually vacant coaching position, it was obvious that the Cowboys wanted to keep him in his current role as the frontman and designated crap-catcher for their carousel of nonsense. And yet it makes perfect sense, and is somehow exactly as obvious, that the Cowboys fired McCarthy on Monday, the next-to-last day of their exclusive negotiating window with him. I mean, that's how you figured it would go, right—one way or another, the team would find the dumbest thing to do, for the dumbest reason, and do it at the dumbest time. That is the Cowboy Way. And when we say "Cowboys," we mean of course Jerry Jones.
Now you may find that firing McCarthy has its merits; this would especially be true if you somehow saw him as the only thing keeping the Cowboys from their true place at the center of the football universe, which is a denial of both logic and Jones's position as owner/general manager/godhead/glowering presence. This past season alone, McCarthy was up for a new deal after going 3-2 in the first five weeks, fired a million times when they lost the next five in succession, guaranteed a new deal a million and one times because the team then won four of their next five games to get to the edge of playoff contention, and then just left to sear evenly on the hot seat because nobody could figure out how to decipher the two losses at the end of their season.
The Cowboys ended up 7-10 after three consecutive seasons at 12-5, three playoff appearances that were noteworthy mostly for their brevity, a record six consecutive home games in which they trailed by 20 points or more, and an undefinable malaise caused by the persistent lie that the Cowboys deserve better results just because they are the Cowboys. It wasn’t great, but given Jerry's stewardship over every aspect of the organization, McCarthy's five-year record of 49-35 is probably more than they deserved.
As always, it's the timing that makes this special. Jerry looked around after the first week of the playoffs and decided, in his intermittently charming and reliably megalomaniac way, that he wasn't getting enough attention for letting McCarthy dangle. Or, if this wasn't dangling, he had simply forgotten that the Bears might have been willing to take McCarthy off his hands without fuss or muss. Or maybe Jones remembered all that but was damned if he would let an insouciant brigand like Ginny McCaskey steal the guy he wanted to fire. All things are possible in the dance hall of Jerry's mind; his true skill isn't in knowing what he wants, but in making us watch while he tries in his usual ludicrous way to figure it out.
It isn't so much that McCarthy deserved to stay on the job, although the Cowboys were so incompletely built and ravaged by injuries to important players that his work this year was tough to assess. Nor was it that Jones could have done this last week when his mind was a week fresher, or that his endless search for a bargain got in the way of signing McCarthy to a new deal at his current rate of pay, a mere $8 million. Jones was alleged to have been critical of the number of people on McCarthy's coaching staff, though he might have also figured that paying a top-12 coaching salary for seven wins is not value for cattle. Again, he works in mysterious ways. This is normally the case when someone's directional instinct is the place he was standing five minutes earlier.
And maybe therein lies the way to explain the various methodologies for McCarthy's dismissal—boredom, both inside the compound and out. The Cowboys were boring when they won and only incrementally less boring when they lost. McCarthy, for his part, worked ceaselessly at being boring, as he had in Green Bay before that. Jerry is now pretty much a constant public bore himself, even though he still runs the owners' meetings and as such must be heeded on all matters not directly related to the actual football. Whatever the Cowboys were intended to be when McCarthy was hired, they stopped being that this year. Now, they are a bottom-third team without the glitter that comes with draft speculation—they pick 12th, a glamorous place to be only if you're the team drafting 13th—and their most interesting player might be All-Pro kicker Brandon Aubrey. They are irrelevant in every aspect save brand recognition, and that is a rolling condemnation of their managing general face of the franchise. And Jerry isn’t about to fire himself.
So McCarthy is out, but at 61 he won't yet be banished Belichick-style. He's still won 60 percent of his games, no matter how style- or personality-deficient he might be, and there are teams out there who could certainly do worse than bringing him in to run the show. There are many teams that repeatedly have done worse. All it will take for McCarthy to get another gig is an owner who either doesn't know what he or she wants, or one who knows what they want but has no earthly idea how to get it. You know, like Jerry. Frankly, it seems a shame that he just fired Mike McCarthy, because he'd be just the guy to hire him. Hell, Jer' might hire him again. He's a hoot that way.
