Cowboys McCarthy, Prescott at crossroads after humiliating wild-card loss
The Dallas Cowboys 48-32 loss has once again ended a season in a manner that feels premature. Last year’s 12-win team made it to a road divisional game in San Francisco. While there was hope the club could advance over an inexperienced QB, results from 2023 have confirmed that Brock Purdy and the 49ers are the real deal and that loss was not the embarrassment it seemed like at the time.
But this loss, to the seventh-seeded Green Bay Packers is much different. Dallas will have to take a long look in the mirror and determine whether or not they’ve hit their ceiling with this head coach and quarterback combination. Both sides of the team shoulder equal blame for the disaster on Sunday, but as the faces of the franchise, Mike McCarthy and Dak Prescott are at a crossroads, and in the crosshairs.
There’s going to be a lot to unpack about both roles over the next 24 hours, but the options Jerry Jones and company have are wholly different for the two men.
Mike McCarthy's situation
As our Reid Hanson pointed out earlier in Sunday, McCarthy has stabilized the Cowboys as the perennial contender their roster has demanded. Three straight 12-win seasons has brought them two division championships that resulted in zero playoff wins, and a wild-card road victory over a team under .500.
That’s not good enough for a coach who was brought in for his ability to win in the playoffs.
Full disclosure, I was on the Hire McCarthy train before Jason Garrett was let go. I had a future coach power ranking where McCarthy was the top rung after Sean Payton and Bill Belichick, both of whom would require trades to acquire.
But he has not accomplished the ultimate reason why he was hired.
McCarthy has one year remaining on his deal, but there’s no salary cap on coaching staff and Jerry Jones has deep pockets. As a stand alone decision, McCarthy very well could be on his way out, considering the wide swath of potential replacements.
There are young, up-and-coming offensive minds and veteran coaches with varying pedigree available.
But there’s also a link with the quarterback that must be considered.
Dak Prescott's situation
Prescott has a ton of detractors, and his performance on Sunday certainly gives them the necessary fuel to climb atop their soap boxes. Prescott was, without question, the best passer in the NFL regular season. He probably won’t win the MVP, but he cleared Lamar Jackson in passing. But for the second-straight playoff performance, Prescott played a bad playoff game.
During the regular season, while he and the offense crapped the bed in blowout road losses to San Francisco and Buffalo, he excelled in other games against above .500 teams.
In two games against Philadelphia, and one each against other playoff teams from Los Angeles, Detroit, Buffalo —along with the 9-8 Seattle Seahawks —Prescott dominated.
In those six games he threw 16 touchdowns against just one interception.
However in his last two playoff performances, Prescott has been unable to command his team’s offense to any great degree. Garbage-time stats achieved with the team down 24 points or more boosted his numbers against the Packers to a respectable level, with over 400 yards passing and three scores, but make no mistake Prescott shoulders as much blame as anyone for this defeat.
And with the way the offense played last January in San Francisco, the team is now 2-5 in their last seven playoff contests.
It’s completely fair that after eight seasons at the helm, it’s fair for the team to wonder whether or not Prescott is the quarterback who can lead them to the promise land. But because the way the team failed to commit to Prescott earlier in his career, they are pretty much backed into a corner now.
Prescott's contract
The Cowboys played around with Prescott’s extension as he outplayed his rookie contract. It led to a franchise tag for the 2020 season. After missing the majority of the season and the offense falling apart without him, Prescott negotiated a league-best deal with the utmost in favorable clauses.
First, he made the team slap a second franhise tag on him, so if he was ever tagged again it would be a third tag, worth at 140% his prior year’s salary. He got them to agree to a four-year deal, keeping them with a five-year window following the end of his rookie deal (as he was tagged the previous season).
Then, Prescott got not just a no-tag clause, but also a no-trade clause.
And there’s where things get extremely difficult for Jones, even if he comes to the conclusion he wants to move on and hit reset.
Prescott has a $60 million cap hit in 2024, a no-tag clause which basically demands the Cowboys to come back to the negotiating table or risk him walking after 2024 for just a 2026 third-round comp pick.
And if the Cowboys want to trade Prescott, he’ll be able to refuse a trade to any team he doesn’t want to go to, likely lessening Dallas’ position of strength in demanding multiple first-round picks in return.
It’s not impossible to move on from Prescott, but it’s likely the return would not match the quality of return one would expect. An acquiring team could easily see a Matthew Stafford scenario where a change in scenery out of Big D could lead to a more calm Prescott in the big games.
But Dallas may not be able to extract the type of return the Detroit Lions did, and they’d have $62 million of dead money on their 2024 cap.
Everyone on board, but no one happy?
So if the quarterback situation, at the minimum, leads to keeping Prescott for at least one more year, does that limit what Jones would want to do with the head coach-playcaller-designer of the offense?
Would it be a lame-duck year for Prescott? Would he look at it as one more year and then on to an organization that hasn’t failed to achieve success for almost three decades?
And from the Cowboys’ perspective, what options would there be to move on from Prescott? Could they really consider handing the reins over to Trey Lance, after not having him active at all this season to see what he can do? Could they bit the compensation bullet and try and draft a QB from this loaded class and start from scratch?
Jones will likely take a couple days to sort out his options.
