Mike McCarthy: I'm aware of the Sean Payton chatter
On a certain level, you can't help but feel for Mike McCarthy. Yes, he's the head coach of the most visible team in football, working for the loyal-to-a-fault Jerry Jones. Jones fashions himself a "football man," which means once you're in with Jerry, you're in; to cut bait would mean admitting a mistake on his part. But because Jerry is so desperate to have his ego validated through winning, his presence clings to everything at The Star like a noxious gas. In how many other organizations does the owner and the owner's two sons sit in on meetings?
And that's not all. Both of McCarthy's coordinators got multiple head coaching interviews this winter, and so McCarthy is exactly one 2-game losing skid from the "interim head coach Dan Quinn?" storyline. Here's how Jerry addressed this very topic last month: “Mike knows that someday somebody other than him will be the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys."
That quote came in a radio interview, that was then covered on the team's own website.
So loud was the chatter that McCarthy had to go on Rich Eisen's podcast and say this, "I’m the leader of this football team."
This Tywin Lannister quote from Game of Thrones comes to mind, "Any man who must say 'I am the king' is no true king."
But wait, there's more!
Sean Payton's January retirement amped the pressure on McCarthy from 10 to 20. Here you have what many Cowboy observers believe to be Jerry's White Whale -- Payton was the Cowboys' assistant head coach and quarterbacks coach from 2003-05, leaving to take the New Orleans job -- not only on the market, but living in Dallas. Payton kept a home in the Dallas area while coaching in New Orleans (the new Netflix movie was based on Payton coaching his son's Dallas-area 6th grade team during his year-long suspension in 2012).
The Jones-Payton romance is more than a decade old. Peter King captured this scene following the Saints' Super Bowl win at the 2010 Combine. (The original story has been deleted from the Internet, what follows is a summary from Pro Football Talk.)
The Saints’ staff had dinner on Friday night at St. Elmo Steakhouse. Coach Sean Payton wanted a magnum of Caymus Special Selection cabernet sauvignon. (We assume that opening the bottle entailed no unscrewing.)
The only problem? Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was hosting his staff in the same room the next night, and Jones had phoned ahead and reserved a bottle of the same wine. But there was only one left.
Payton insisted, and in continuation of a recent trend he won.
It wasn’t enough for Payton to secure the wine. The next night, when the Cowboys arrived, the empty bottle was on the table with a handwritten note on the label: “WHO DAT! World Champions XLIV, Sean Payton.”
So not only do you have a ready-made interim in Quinn, you've got the long-awaited full-time replacement in Payton unoccupied and, presumably, refreshed after a year off.
On the field, the Cowboys are recovering from a first-round playoff exit, losing a wild card game at home to San Francisco -- in embarrassing fashion, no less.
"When you get this combination of players together," Jones said after the San Francisco loss, "you need to have success."
Ignoring the oddity of an owner/GM giving quotes after the game, you have this not-so-coded message: The personnel department (i.e., Jerry and Stephen Jones) did their job, the coaches did not.
Asked Tuesday if he's aware of the Payton chatter, McCarthy told the Dallas Morning News, “It’s a narrative I don’t want to be a part of,” McCarthy said. “I don’t think anybody would want to be a part of it on either side of the fence. In fairness to Sean, he’s being asked the questions, but nothing good comes out of that. Our conversations [between McCarthy and Jones], when we talk about the partnership between the head coach and the G.M., those are the conversations him and I have. . . . He addressed it. We laughed about it, and moved on. That’s really where it is.”
McCarthy and his boss may have shared a laugh, but the implication is clear. If the Cowboys don't win a playoff game in 2022, it's difficult to imagine McCarthy returning for a fourth season in 2023.
