Jerry Jones has backed the Dallas Cowboys to break their playoff curse next season as he referred to a basketball analogy to describe his ease with the current state of his team on Tuesday.
The Cowboys suffered the embarrassment of a wild-card round exit to the Green Bay Packers in the playoffs after its third consecutive 12-win season. What’s more is that going into the postseason, Dallas had won the NFC East
Jones decided to stick with head coach Mike McCarthy for a fourth season after the shock first-round defeat despite the latter owning a 1-3 playoff record in the last four seasons.
Speaking to reporters at the Reese’s Senior Bowl, per Michael Gehlken of The Dallas Morning News, the 81-year-old billionaire said of his recent staffing decision and next season’s objectives: ‘What I would say is, I hope it’s not different going into the first playoff game where we’ve got the second seed. I hope it’s not different at all, to that point, where we got the second seed.
‘Now let’s talk about how we might make it different when we play in that game and get a win, OK? We need to stop the run better, we need to be more physical, and we need to run better, to be specific. We need to do those kinds of things.
And so, my point is, I look at that and I though we made a pretty good move four years ago when we hired Mike McCarthy, and he’s had some great in-season success. Now he’s come up short three times and advances us in the playoff.
But I like the fact that he’s hanging around the rim, and I like what the team has done to hang around the rim. So, I think, what the answer that I would have is, that I’m aware that we’re hanging around the rim.
‘We’re not getting the ball in but when you hang around the rim – let’s don’t discount hanging around the rim – where we are right now with the players we’ve got, and I’m thinking about it from the whole look.’
McCarthy won a Super Bowl and went to three other NFC championship games in 12-plus seasons as coach of the Packers. That’s why Jones hired him in 2020 after 10 years of watching Jason Garrett’s teams fail to get past the divisional round.
The most recent time Dallas reached an NFC title game was the last of the franchise’s five Super Bowl titles during the 1995 season.
McCarthy’s fourth season as Dallas head coach was his first as QB Dak Prescott’s play-caller, though that is expected to change in the offseason as the Cowboys consider a quarterbacks coach.
While Prescott led the NFL with 36 touchdown passes and had a career-best completion rate of 69.5 percent, he continued a pattern of spotty postseason play. Prescott is 2-5 in the playoffs.
McCarthy is not expected to receive any sort of extension from the Cowboys and will coach the 2024 season on an expiring contract, sources told ESPN, earlier in Jan.
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