Now that the regular season is over, it’s time for the Dallas Cowboys to focus on getting this team back into a position of competing as a playoff contender at the least. But before we get to offseason business, we need to look at who is most to blame for this train going so far off the tracks this season.
Jerry Jones
Let’s be real. Everything within the Cowboys’ organization starts and ends with one Jerral Wayne Jones Sr. As owner and general manager since he purchased the team in the late 1980s, Jones’ fingerprints have been all over anything that goes on in Dallas. The Cowboys saw great success in the first decade of Jones’ ownership mainly under the guidance of head coach Jimmy Johnson.
However, without the checks and balances needed to keep Jones from meddling too much, this franchise has struggled to get over the hump. It hasn’t mattered who the coach is or quarterback, the Cowboys have failed to make it past the divisional round of the playoffs in almost 30 years. So, who else should get the blame if not Jones?
Other than Johnson, only Bill Parcells in the mid-2000s would stand up to Jones in any manner. But even Parcells only lasted four years under Jones’ thumb before deciding he’d had enough. Yes, it’s the same story that’s been told a million times about Jerry but it’s like Groundhog Day in Dallas. He continues to do the same things over and over. In the dictionary, there should be a picture of Jones next to the word, insanity.
Jones outright refuses to bring in a GM other than himself to run the team. He’s totally within his right as the owner here but it hasn’t worked in a long time in terms of even getting close to competing for a Super Bowl. Even in years where the Cowboys are strong “favorites” (which seems like most years), they end up falling short much like in 2024.
"No, just no," . "I bought the team. I think the first thing that came out of my mouth when somebody asked, 'Did you buy this for your kids?' I said, 'Hell, no. I bought it for (myself), and I didn't buy an investment. I bought an occupation, and I bought something that I was going to do for the rest of my life, and that's what I'm doing.
"And so, no. The facts are that since I have to decide where the money's spent, then you might as well cut all the b******t out. That's who's making the call anyway."
Mike McCarthy
Mike McCarthy’s boss may get most of the blame but there’s no way the head coach should escape without even a mention. Coach McCarthy got off on the wrong foot in Dallas in 2020 after it was revealed that he allegedly “lied." Although Dallas has had three 12-win seasons under McCarthy, they never really felt like real Super Bowl contenders.
"I need to confess,” McCarthy said back in 2020 I told Jerry I watched every play of the 2019 season," during his introductory press conference in 2020. "I wanted the job. You do what you gotta do, right?"
"It was more about tracking the trends and seeing what people were doing," McCarthy said. "And a big part of it, too, was watching players, watching some of these new offenses, really a couple of guys on defense we were able to study.
That’s what it felt like McCarthy’s done for most of the past five years in Dallas. Stand there and just watch. It feels like plenty of other coaches could have filled McCarthy’s shoes in Dallas the past few years. This has not been a team devoid of talent by any means. They had talent before McCarthy got there and he was supposed to get them across that threshold. But that has not happened and likely won’t if Jones brings McCarthy back next season. There should be no chance of the Cowboys running it back one more time with McCarthy but then this is Jerry Jones making the decision.