Mike McCarthy said this week that he has a 21-game plan for the Cowboys, laying it out in a team meeting as he does before every season. That plan might have to come to fruition for the coach to return for a sixth season in Dallas.
The Cowboys didn’t fire McCarthy after last season’s postseason fiasco, a 48-32 home loss to the Packers in the wild-card round. Neither did they give him an extension after a third consecutive 12-win regular season, a first for the organization since the 1990s.
The Cowboys’ entire coaching staff and more than 30 players, including quarterback Dak Prescott, are in the final year of their deals.
Multiple times Jones has mentioned the Green Bay loss as the reason he didn’t extend McCarthy’s contract.
“I admit this, the Green Bay thing,” Jones told Clarence Hill of DLLS. “When we lost the Green Bay game, we basically had everybody say, ‘OK, what are you going to do about this? OK, this wasn’t just a game. What are you going to do about this?’ And so it got the attention of everything we do.”
McCarthy has admitted the “challenge” of being a lame-duck coach, but Jones doesn’t see it that way. Jones has turned up the heat on everyone in the organization, believing that the “angst and pressure” of being in a contract year will bring out their best.
“I don’t know that there’s any more urgency, but I have tried to look at places that we are complacent or ways not to be complacent,” Jones said. “I’m looking for ways to make sure they can’t say that I’ve got some kind of structure that breeds complacency. It can be contracts. It can be conversations. It can be player decisions. . . . But here’s the overall thing I have heard from fans with even more emotion, after the Green Bay game and still hearing from [them], ‘You need to make some changes.’ And I’m still hearing it. I didn’t make many changes. But within the realm of not making changes, totally changing people out, I tried to turn up the heat on myself and…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/jerry-jones-turns-heat-mike-195557708.html
Author : ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports
Publish date : 2024-09-03 19:55:57
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.