Some believed that maintaining Mike McCarthy was the right decision, even though it wasn’t the popular one.
Following the Cowboys’ terrible playoff home loss, there was a lot of conjecture online for several days. Eventually, the team revealed that Mike McCarthy would be returning for the 2024 campaign. Naturally, this has sparked a lively reaction from the supporters, many of whom were eager to try something different following the difficult defeat.
Although it’s understandable to be frustrated by yet another early playoff exit, the choice to really remove a coach needs to be considered more carefully. Everyone wants to see the Cowboys return to the Super Bowl and have a successful postseason run. Not a single person working on this franchise’s building is unaware of its objective.
However, there’s also the obvious truth that it’s difficult to win a Super Bowl. There are only four head coaches in the present era who have won the championship game, and Andy Reid, who has two rings, is the only one who has done so more than once. Though he has won it six times, Bill Belichick is undoubtedly the exception in this case and is currently unemployed. To illustrate how difficult this is, even Belichick had only made one postseason appearance in the previous four years (he was 0-1 in that season).
Not only is it hard to win the Super Bowl, but it’s hard to win in the playoffs at all. Just five head coaches currently in use have a winning postseason record—six if we count Belichick. That represents hardly 20% of the league. Several prominent coaches with a losing record in the postseason include Doug Pederson and Mike Tomlin, the champions of the Super Bowl, Kevin Stefanski, who is a strong candidate for Coach of the Year, and Matt LaFleur, who just eliminated the Cowboys.
To put things in perspective, each season there are thirty-one teams that are not the Super Bowl winners. It is typical for approximately six teams to replace their head coach following the season, meaning that approximately twenty-five teams annually remain with their current head coach despite not winning the Super Bowl. That represents more than 78% of the league that chooses not to rotate its leadership each year.
That’s not even accounting for the teams’ performance and future directions. The most recent instance of a team firing its coach after making it to the playoffs dates back to the 2017 campaign. That was Mike Mularkey’s firing by the Titans following his second consecutive 9-7 result and his first-ever postseason trip. That was a surprising decision that was a part of a convoluted story that finally revealed a rift between Mularkey and his players.
