Disaster in Dallas; The Mike McCarthy Era Begins

BY ADAM GREENE

When explaining why he hired Mike McCarthy as the new head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, owner Jerry Jones said, “I heard bells.”

Did he also smell burning toast?

Did his left arm go numb?

Are we sure this wasn’t all just symptoms of a stroke?

Regardless, here we are, Cowboys fans. You’ve got your man and as much as you may want to, you can’t give him back. At least not yet.

I live in the Southeastern United states in Tennessee Titans, Atlanta Falcons and Carolina Panthers country. Peppered in there are plenty of Ohio transplants and some of them, unfortunately, still like the Cleveland Browns.

As soon as the offseason began, as the rumor mill started to churn, my Twitter and Facebook feeds were filled with terror from those same Browns and Panthers fans as McCarthy’s name was continually connected to their coach-less franchises.

Carolina jumped early on the McCarthy train, interviewing the former Packers coach right before Christmas like some sort of Dickensian nightmare. Only instead of three ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, they could have gotten one McCarthy-sized grim reaper, all dressed in the guise of a guy about to shut down and dominate a county fair corn dog eating contest.

The Browns interviewed McCarthy on Jan. 2, right after the regular season. Cleveland fans hold within them lots of natural despair. My friend Mike, while we’re watching a Browns game, will dissect exactly how his team will lose that very game after the second play from scrimmage.

With John Dorsey as general manager, it seemed almost too perfect an opportunity for owner Jimmy Haslam to once again drive his team into a hog crap lagoon. After all, Dorsey worked for the Green Bay Packers when they hired McCarthy. Was a reunion too far away?

It was, only not in the way Dorsey probably wanted as Haslam, somehow, did the smart thing and dumped the useless GM to the curb. He also didn’t hire Mike McCarthy and, as far as I’m concerned, that makes Jimmy H 2-for-2 and for a while, both Dorsey and McCarthy were deservedly out of work.

The relief when news broke that Dallas hired McCarthy was palpable. My twitter feed was full of it. The exaltations. The praise to the appropriate deities. People posting instagram stories hugging and crying. It was a real moment and you could feel it, even if you weren’t in Cleveland or Charlotte. Those fanbases had been saved.

And all it took was the complete and total destruction of the Dallas Cowboys to do it.

The fact that teams were interviewing Mike McCarthy at all showed just how poorly run these organizations are. It’s a hiring out of panic, out desperation. It’s talking yourself into a guy when there are eight staffs full of far superior coaches still playing football this weekend. There’s a reason you can’t interview those people yet. They’re good at their jobs.

I wrote when McCarthy got fired by the Packers that, if was ever hired again (and he shouldn’t have been), he would never lead a team past nine wins again. Only here he’s been handed the keys to a Lamborghini. Dallas is loaded with talent on both sides of the ball. The fact that Jason Garrett couldn’t win 10 games with this team is what cost him his job.

McCarthy is in a Bill O’Brien situation now. The team’s roster is too good to be terrible. The division is ass and might be for a while. He might, MIGHT I SAY, prove me wrong and win 10 games at some point in the next couple of seasons.

But that’s it. There will be no Super Bowls for the Cowboys. Dallas has looked at its available coaching candidates and literally hired the dumbest guy on their doorstep. You don’t have to believe me. Believe Aaron Rodgers, who is quoted as saying that McCarthy has one of the lowest, if not the lowest, football IQs of any coach he ever worked with.

That’s who Dallas just saddled Dak Prescott with.

Good job, Jerry.

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