In case anybody forgot, the Dallas Cowboys host the Washington Commanders on Sunday. The season finale has become more of an inflection point than a football game.
What awaits on the other side is the biggest mystery surrounding the team.
Mike McCarthy hasn’t been asked this week how his team plans to contain Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels. The coaching duel between Dan Quinn had some luster last month, but feels irrelevant this time around.
The main topic this week — and frankly, to a lesser extent, the past few weeks — has been about the future of the coaching staff. McCarthy is the face of those discussions as the head coach but the dialogue extends to the rest of his staff, too. The futures of Mike Zimmer, Brian Schottenheimer and John Fassel are in limbo. Each coordinator — defensive, offensive and special teams — is on an expiring deal.
“It’s been a challenging year, based on the contract situations for the coaches,” McCarthy said. “It’s stating the obvious, but we’ll have time to talk about that next week.”
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Bringing McCarthy back in 2024 as a lame duck head coach wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t egregious. One can argue the pros and cons of having a coach run out the final year of his contract without an extension but it’s not an absurd situation.
Many could make the case that, after the playoff debacle last season against the Green Bay Packers, McCarthy shouldn’t have been brought back to even run out the final year of his deal. Contracts are nice to have, and they represent a sense of confidence and financial security, but hardly mean ironclad job security. Robert Saleh was in the fourth year of his five-year deal when the New York Jets fired him earlier this season. The New Orleans Saints canned Dennis Allen in November, in the third year of his four-year contract.
These things are not unusual.
The way the Cowboys went about this entire ordeal with McCarthy, though, was strange. Much of the offseason was polluted with Jerry Jones’ “all in” mantra. Nothing the Cowboys did lined up with the standard definition of what it would mean to be “all in,” so, Jones said his definition was different.
“Your definition of what is all in and mine, might not be the same thing,” Jones said at the NFL Combine.
Until Sept. 8, one could infer Jones’ definition. The head coach, offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator and special teams coordinator, among other coaches, were on expiring deals. So was the quarterback. It appeared that Jones’ definition of “all in” was that every significant position at the top was on notice, from the coaches to the marquee player. Produce results in 2024, or else wholesale change was legitimately on the table for 2025.
Then, the Cowboys extended Dak Prescott hours before kicking off the season.
This isn’t to debate the merits of Prescott’s extension, which many believed should have happened long before it did. But if there are three positions an owner can look upon to inject a major wave of change, it is the general manager, the head coach and the starting quarterback. The general manager has lifetime immunity and, after Sept. 8, the quarterback was locked in for the foreseeable future.
That left McCarthy as the lone path to major change.
With the way the Cowboys handled the past year, evaluating that necessity can be tricky. They let talent walk out the door last offseason, then sat out free agency. They were still figuring out significant parts of the roster in August — something McCarthy publicly expressed as an issue two months ago.
“You try to make sure, through veteran free agency, you have spots full, or at least you can go play a game today if you had to, in April,” McCarthy said on Nov. 7. “Then, you’re not drafting for need. … I personally, as a head coach, would really — when you’re signing veterans in camp and you’re doing things at the end, I think that’s a pretty big challenge.”
At 3-3 in October, Jones was already answering questions about the head coach, and if there would be a change midseason. Less than a month later, superstar defender Micah Parsons was fielding questions about the status of the head coach, and came under fire for the way he phrased his answer. Even as the miserable season wore on, the support for McCarthy kept pouring in, from guys in the organization, like Prescott, and guys on the outside but have inside experience, like Troy Aikman and Jimmy Johnson.
McCarthy is aware of the good and bad outcomes with his position. As much as he’d like to block out the noise, it’s impossible when you’re in Dallas, for better or worse. As the losses pile up, the logistical reality of the contract looms large.
All of it sets the stage for a strange final week.
McCarthy and Zimmer have each been in the NFL for more than three decades. Both have been fired from a head coaching job, so it’s not foreign territory for them. They know how to handle the questions. Schottenheimer and Fassel are sons of former NFL head coaches. Schottenheimer spoke this week about how not much could rattle him, given he saw his dad lose the head coaching job with the San Diego Chargers in 2006, after a 14-2 season ended with a quick playoff exit.
“What I’ve learned through the years is, you’re promised 17 games and you owe that to your team,” Schottenheimer said. “You owe that to the players and staff. Sunday’s going to come. We’re going to play out (our) last game and see what happens but nothing surprises me.”
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Fassel vividly remembers his dad’s final days as the head man with the New York Giants.
“I was in the stadium before they fired him and the chants rang out, ‘Fassel must go,’ ” Fassel remembered. “I’m sitting there like, damn, 75,000 people mad at my dad, and he’s trying his ass off. It hardens you a little bit, I think in a good way. It doesn’t make you resentful or it doesn’t make you hate the game. It just makes you realize, it’s pretty fickle and sometimes it goes great, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
The Cowboys enter a season finale in which nothing will provide a data point that doesn’t already exist. The playoff failures are on the table. The team showed fight for McCarthy when the chances were slim, and even when the postseason chances were gone. McCarthy was brought in for playoff wins and that won’t happen this season. There aren’t many options that weren’t there for the Cowboys last year, had they moved on from McCarthy after the Packers loss. Black Monday could always add candidates to the pool but no big fish is expected to enter the picture.
The Cowboys’ approach with the coaching staff in 2024 wasn’t unusual, in isolated steps, but it was incredibly disjointed. That’s what makes the final domino, which should fall in the next week or so, harder to predict.
(Photo: Ron Jenkins / Getty Images)
