DALLAS — My personal take on the omicron variant is that while it’s not that bad for most of us — cold-like symptoms with moments of unclarity that aren’t so different from my standard moments of unclarity — it’s still powerful enough to make you miss an entire Cowboys postseason.
Who knew that after three hours, 16 minutes, the highest-scoring team in club history would be finished?
My personal take on what needs to happen in the wake of 49ers 23, Cowboys 17 is that some nice parting gifts should be handed directly to Mike McCarthy while Jerry Jones announces that Dan Quinn will be the 10th head coach in Cowboys history. The Cowboys owner was purposely vague about some of his thoughts related to the club’s latest first-round playoff defeat, saying he would not get into coaching talk of any kind.
Jones’ most telling quote came when asked if his team had been ready for the 49ers. “Again I’m not going to discuss the coaching, the preparation, any of these things. That’s not on the table. The game speaks for itself,” he said. “Really, I thought the score was not indicative of the game.”
In other words, he knew the 49ers outplayed the Cowboys badly and that Dallas, through a bit of hard work and the good fortune of a Jimmy Garoppolo interception, crawled back into the contest at the end. But let’s get right to the point of why McCarthy is here in the first place. It’s so that playoff games won’t look like they did during the Jason Garrett era.
A 13-0 lead for the 49ers before the Cowboys even got their car started sure looked a lot like a 21-3 Packers lead here back when Dak and Zeke were rookies. A team playoff record 14 penalties? Who’s at fault here for an ongoing issue — the Cowboys led the league in penalties — that never got resolved? Instead, the club nearly turned into the worst kind of excuse makers, even Dak Prescott pointing fingers and making a flippant comment about fans’ throwing debris at refs after he had one of his poorest big games to date.
The game’s final play was not a risk worth taking because the Cowboys don’t know how to execute it. How many times did you see Arizona’s Larry Fitzgerald catch a late pass and hurry to hand the ball to the nearest official, knowing he has to set it before the team can spike the ball? The umpire slammed into Prescott mostly because the quarterback had run too far and then given him no room to squeeze between him and the center to touch the ball.
McCarthy defended it, and I don’t take that as anything more than defending another poor call by offensive coordinator Kellen Moore who had plenty in the second half of the season. Moore still thinks Zeke is the key to the Cowboys’ offense and that Tony Pollard should be used sparingly if at all. That was painfully evident again Sunday as Zeke got 31 yards on 13 touches. It’s something a stronger head coach would have cleaned up earlier this season, but McCarthy never did.
(If you believe the Cowboys play Zeke too much because Jerry insists upon it, I will just say I don’t agree with you but cannot prove you’re wrong. It’s not out of the question).
So Quinn and Moore will get their interviews this week, and the only significant risk for the club is that Quinn will be gone. Why let that happen? In what way is this team better by having McCarthy as head coach with a new defensive coordinator to be determined than just having Quinn continue to manage the defense as the head coach?
The improvement on this team in 2021 came on defense. Even against the 49ers when the defense got pushed around more than it will ever acknowledge (apparently a lion can be bullied), the group held San Francisco to field goals often enough to stay within range. It’s a risk-taking defense that will give up some big plays to make some big plays, but it’s far better than what Dallas had grown accustomed to.
I acknowledge that two years is a very short time for evaluations, and given that both seasons have been disrupted by COVID, one can argue that it’s simply too soon. But what are we really talking about here? Garrett got fired because his winning teams did not excel in the playoffs. In his last two seasons, Dallas was 19-15 with one playoff win. McCarthy’s two teams are 18-16 with no playoff wins. The overall record was damaged by Prescott’s absence in 2020. But this was an extremely healthy Cowboys team that took the field against the 49ers, who lost their best pass rusher before halftime and you would never know that from watching the game.
San Francisco was better prepared in every area except for allowing Dallas to execute a fake punt. There was nothing in the least surprising about Kyle Shanahan’s head-on approach to the Cowboys’ attack. Meanwhile Dallas was going against some of the more highly exposed cornerbacks in the league, and you would never know that either.
Seventeen points. Fourteen penalties. Lots of excuses about the refs. That’s what this team produced on its biggest day under Mike McCarthy.
Chan Gailey disappeared after two playoff losses in two years back when Jones had higher expectations for his team. Why shouldn’t Jerry let Cowboys fans see what Quinn can do in an elevated role? Or are you really expecting drastic improvements from McCarthy in 2022?
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