There was plenty of blame to go around after the Dallas Cowboys’ first-round playoff exit. It was the second time in three seasons that the Cowboys lost at home in the Wild Card round with a win in Tampa Bay sandwiched between.
Head coach Mike McCarthy shouldered some of that blame after a 48-32 drubbing at the hands of his former team. However, the Cowboys elected to stick with their head coach rather than looking for a replacement.
Former NFL scout Bryan Broaddus of the Audacy original podcast “Love of the Star” explained how the Cowboys players may have helped save McCarthy’s job after the first-round exit.
“I don’t think it hurt, Bobby. I don’t think it did,” Broaddus said when asked if the Cowboys players saved McCarthy’s job (5:40 in player above). “I think the players, they really really like Mike McCarthy. Even the hardened people in the organization that are like ‘We need to do something different,’ they like Mike McCarthy.”
Broaddus recently went on an on-air rant about Stephen Jones and not wanting change. He mentioned during the podcast that when you bring in someone like Bill Belichick or Mike Vrabel they’re going to be questioned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93aE3nFP0Fo
He also pointed to the Cowboys’ regular-season success under McCarthy. Although the postseason failures have overshadowed that, you can’t completely overlook the three-straight 12-win seasons.
“I just know that these teams that have continuity, they tend to do a pretty good job. And Dallas has won 36 games in the last three years. Mike McCarthy, if he was coaching in Carolina, Atlanta, Arizona they’d throw a damn parade for him with as many games as he’s won,” Broaddus said. “I kind of feel like they’re putting him out there, they’re like ‘OK, you got one more shot,’ but deep down inside, Stephen and Will (McClay) are kind of hoping he sees this thing through and somehow gets an extension out of this.”
Broaddus acknowledged that perhaps the relationship between McCarthy and his players hasn’t always been great. But that has evolved over the years and the Cowboys may be in a better spot with McCarthy than without him.
“This is going to sound terrible,” Broaddus warned. “Sometimes when you’re a player and you feel like the change could potentially happen, you take the opposite approach and you’re like ‘If that guy goes I need to go too.’”
Prescott did just that after the playoff loss to the Packers. There’s something to be said about the continuity in Dallas.
“Players don’t always want that blood on their hands. They don’t. They don’t want to be the guy that’s known as the coach killer,” Broaddus continued. “Generally, players don’t want to be the guy that comes out and says ‘We got to do something different. We need something different. We need to look at ourselves but maybe we need to look at the whole operation.’ Sometimes you’ll hear people say that… Dak is really good at playing this game. He’s very savvy with how politics and stuff work.”
The relationship between Prescott and McCarthy has grown recently.
“I don’t think it’s always been pretty between the head coach and the quarterback. Something gave after the bye,” Broaddus said. “Somebody walked into Mike McCarthy’s office and said ‘You keep calling offenses like that, we’re all going to get fired. We need to do something differently here.’ That’s kind of where we’re at right now.
“Sometimes these players will stand up there, like I said, and they will ‘Oh man, we got to look at ourselves and this that and the other,’ because they don’t want the blood on their hands. They don’t want to be the guy that all of a sudden got rid of a head coach because of comments they made.”
Both McCarthy and Prescott are entering the final years of their contracts unless something changes this offseason. We’ll see if they can finally get over the hump in the 2024 season.
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