Mike McCarthy (Getty Images/Cooper Neill)
New Year’s resolutions are a strategy for the whole year. For the Dallas Cowboys the season is over, and 2024 was a bust. Hope still lies in 2025. That goes for plenty of other teams in the NFL as well. The Cowboys’ backups more or less played better than the starters. But the bottom line is, most of the starters didn’t perform up to their pay grades. Neither did the coach.
Cowboys’ Resolution 1: Hire a new coach
Mike McCarthy went 1-3 in the playoffs in five years. Does anything else matter? He was awful with clock management late in games. He hires poorly performing assistants and pushes out the good ones. If the quarterback’s name didn’t start with Aaron, he’d almost certainly have never won a Super Bowl. The words “Super Bowl winning coach” hold far more weight than they should.
We know the new coach won’t be Bill Belichick since he just signed with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But there are plenty of young and innovative faces out there. Is it possible Jerry Jones is going to chase after one of them? We could see a possible Kellen Moore reunion. He would also lock down the Offensive Coordinator job getting two for the price of one; make it a nifty three if you count stealing him from Philly.
Resolution 2: Draft an early quarterback
Dak Prescott has proven he isn’t the quarterback who can take the team to the next level and beyond. He falls apart in the playoffs. After his rookie campaign in 2016 he appeared to start favoring his brain over his instincts, even though his instincts are far better. Although they were also not good enough. Dak was a fourth-round pick with a low ceiling and a high floor. He has to this point been a failed experiment.
Resolution 3: Get aggressive on defense again
It’s never too early to get a jump on the next season and the philosophies which steer it. When a guy takes a defense backwards, he’s probably not the right coordinator. Additionally, with McCarthy gone the former coaching staff will likely be replaced with new faces.
The defense under Dan Quinn was aggressive and one of the top defenses in the league year after year. Even after some players came back from injury, the aggression seen in recent years simply wasn’t there. It’s better to be proactive than reactive. Even though Quinn is gone the Cowboys still have record breaking ball hawks in the defensive backfield and Micah Parsons up front. Get an aggressive coordinator.
That’s as far as we can go with the Cowboys’ New Year’s resolutions. There’s much more work that needs to be done to rebuild into a winning team, but we’ll stop there for now. If they re-sign McCarthy, prepare to settle for several more seasons of mediocrity.
