Gather the animals two by two, because it’s really happening: the Dallas Cowboys have their best chance to win a Super Bowl since Dez Caught It.
The team’s dismantling of the Eagles last week leaves them in a tier two in the NFC: it’s the Cowboys, Niners and then a drop to the Eagles and Lions. If Dallas can secure home field advantage during the playoffs, they should enter the postseason as the favorites to get out of the NFC despite their sticky record against the Niners.
Dak Prescott is the league’s MVP. In fact, we could go further: Mike McCarthy should be at the forefront of any Coach of the Year conversation.
Don’t scoff or laugh yet. McCarthy doesn’t have as strong a story to tell as Sean McVay. He’s not as likable as Mike McDaniel or Dan Campbell. He has never achieved as big a turnaround as DeMeco Ryans or Shane Steichen. But his case is just as solid.
McCarthy has long been cast as the bozo, the Joey in the NFL production of Friends. And not just any old bozo: a happy bozo. He’s the coach who was fortunate enough to meet Aaron Rodgers, and when that relationship faltered, he got a job with the Cowboys, where he would work with one of the most gifted rosters in the league and as something of a puppet for Jerry Jones would function.
But that theory ignores a crucial fact: Wherever McCarthy goes, he wins. McCarthy has averaged 10 wins per season, including 11 seasons with 10 or more wins in his 17 seasons as head coach. He ranks 11th all-time in winning percentage among coaches who have won more than 100 games, and fifth among active coaches. He has a better winning percentage than John Harbaugh, Bill Walsh and Tom Landry. As coach of the Cowboys, McCarthy is 38-23 and has a chance to become only the second coach in franchise history to win 12 games in three consecutive seasons. Before his arrival, Dallas had not won ten straight games since 1996.
Was he lucky enough to work with Rodgers during his time in Green Bay? Certainly. But he was also instrumental in breaking down Rodgers’ broken college mechanics and rebuilding them in a way that allowed him to become the Aaron Bleeping Rodgers who scorched everything in front of him during his prime. Things broke down at the end of the McCarthy-Rodgers run in Green Bay, but not before McCarthy radically overhauled his offensive philosophy to build a first of its kind “second phase” system that married Rodgers’ out-of-time artistry. with the kind of rhythmic passing game that McCarthy is synonymous with.
Matt LaFleur rightly deserved credit for Rodgers’ back-to-back MVP seasons, but the roots of that infrastructure were built by McCarthy.
It was magical. Not all coaches – especially those cast as arrogant know-it-alls – would have had the foresight or technical expertise to get so much out of an unconventional plan. And Rodgers’ departure in Green Bay suggests that McCarthy alone may not have been the problem in splintering the relationship. He also now has a better winning percentage in Dallas than he did with the Packers and Rodgers.
The job of a head coach is not to covet personal accolades, but to put everyone in the ideal place to succeed. McCarthy has achieved victories in Dallas because he was willing to hand over power regardless of his individual shortcomings as an in-game manager. He happily turned the defense over to Dan Quinn, allowing the defensive coordinator to construct whatever style he wanted. By relinquishing control of the look and feel of the defense, McCarthy was able to keep Quinn for an extra year when the vultures were circling to pluck Quinn away as head coach elsewhere.
And then there’s the foul. When Kellen Moore left the Cowboys this offseason, it was greeted nationally with a sense of doom and gloom. Moore was the offensive prodigy; he was an innovator. McCarthy was shaped like the old dinosaur, too attached to his outdated ideas.
Moore made a lateral move to the Chargers, with McCarthy resuming control of the Dallas offense and bringing in his old friend Brain Schottenheimer to help as OC. Already under pressure to win it all, McCarthy put a bigger target on his back. What if the Dallas offense failed without Moore, while the Chargers offense took off, with Moore taking his exotic style to LA to work with Justin Herbert?
It didn’t work out that way. Injuries ultimately undermined the Chargers’ season. But even when Herbert was fully healthy, the Chargers ranked 17th in EPA/play, a measure of business success. The Cowboys? They rank second in the league in EPA/play, up from 10th while Moore was running the show last season.
Dig deeper through the numbers and things are even more impressive. Dallas scored on a whopping 53.5% of their drives this season, by far the highest mark this season (by about eight percentage points) and the highest mark ever. Not even the ’07 Patriots or the Chiefs of Mahomes, Kelce, Hill and Reid scored on a similar clip. More importantly, the Cowboys have completed just 7.6% of drives with turnovers, the third-best mark in the league.
Usually those that finish at the bottom of the revenue rankings are bad Unpleasant average violations. Their overall numbers are suppressed by the fact that they consistently go three-and-out. They linger so often that their inevitable turnover is not so noticeable in the overall figures.
The league’s best players are typically in the mid-20s. They support drifting, and when they turn the ball over, it stands out in the data.
Not the Cowboys. Here’s how they rank compared to the other contenders in the competition:
Only the Niners – the league’s other offensive juggernaut – are close. And here you see McCarthy’s print again. McCarthy taking back control of the offense this season was a (slight) misnomer. He didn’t take control for himself; he handed the reins to Dak Prescott.
Prescott is the closest the league has come to Peyton Manning’s glory years as a pre-snap operator. No quarterback has as much say in the pre-snap proceedings as the Cowboys quarterback. In an age where defenses are disgusting everything – rolling coverage and obscuring their fronts – the league’s offensive play-callers have limited how much say their quarterbacks have pre-snap. Several plays are called in the huddle. A quarterback can “kill” one to get to another. But rather than giving quarterbacks full operational control, coaches have instead banked on post-snap options (RPOs and run options) and given their quarterbacks the freedom to adjust individual routes depending on the influence of certain defenders.
The days of full shifts – going from one pre-snap formation to another – are over. It is not necessary. If the defense is in the pre-snap position, what’s the point of moving everyone? Instead, play callers prefer to use movement and movement at the cut to create confusion and disorder for the defense.
Not the Cowboys. While they have embraced some of the newfangled ways, no offense revolves around the quarterback’s pre-snap intellect more than Dallas revolves around Prescott.
Some teams use intelligent systems. Others rely on their quarterbacks to create off-schedule magic when the mundane structure breaks down. In Dallas, Prescott is the system. Only the broad strokes of the offense are etched in stone. The rest is left for Prescott to figure it out at the line of scrimmage.
Prescott is on a Jude-Law-in-The-Holiday kind of hot streak this season. He ranks first or second in the NFL in EPA/play, success rate, third down efficiency, big throws, efficiency under pressure and efficiency when not put under pressure.
With complete control, Prescott was magical. He has become more aggressive while cutting back on sales. When RoboDak fell short, he was able to fall back on some of the off-script excellence that defined his early years in the league. These days you can walk into any game against the Cowboys and guarantee the five buckets on the field that Prescott wants to sprinkle. Stopping it, however, has proven another matter.
There were times, including this commentator, when people wondered what exactly McCarthy contributed. He doesn’t run the defense. He has no hand on special teams. He makes consistent managerial blunders in the game. Because Moore ran the offense during his first few seasons in Dallas, his role on his favored side of the ball was limited.
That criticism was justified – to a certain extent. But it missed an essential truth: getting out of the way, relinquishing control, and delegating responsibilities is a skill. If McCarthy was more involved he would get more credit; Why should he be criticized for getting out of the way and allowing talented people to thrive with added responsibility?
As he has developed as a coach, McCarthy has gone from an astute attacking guru to more of a CEO type. He may no longer be a Kyle Shanahan/McVay-style innovator, but he’s happy to hand the bulk of the intellectual effort to his defensive coordinator and his quarterback. And the returns were steep. That’s great coaching. According to Pro Football Reference’s Simple Rating metric, this was McCarthy’s most successful season to date.
His willingness to hand things over to others has given Dallas the best chance to end a 28-year title drought. In Prescott, they have the league’s MVP at quarterback. Over the past month, they have averaged 40 (!) points per game on offense. They have an overwhelming pass rush and playmakers at the back of the defense. As championship formats go, this one is as strong as any in the league.
Whether Dallas can get past the Niners is another question. San Francisco represents a particularly dangerous match. Prescott, McCarthy and Quinn hope to avoid the Niners until the NFC championship game, crossing their fingers the Eagles can fend off Shanahan’s gang before they make it to the championship rodeo.
The playoffs will be the true measure of this Dallas team, and the postseason has a funny way of revealing the Cowboys as pretenders. But this year, Dallas must be confident they can win it all.