Why Mike McCarthy turned the keys to the Dallas Cowboys offense over to Kellen Moore
After being fired following 13 seasons and a Super Bowl title with the Green Bay Packers, Mike McCarthy spent the 2019 season in his private lab studying the NFL and making improvements to his offense.
Now, eight months after being hired by owner Jerry Jones to be the ninth coach in Dallas Cowboys history, McCarthy is heading into Sunday’s game against the Los Angeles Rams with offensive coordinator Kellen Moore running the show.
“I think the most important thing coming from the head coach position is you have to do what’s best for the football team,” said McCarthy, who regretted giving up play-calling duties in Green Bay and vowed he would never do it again.
But that was before coming to Dallas.
“Personally, I know I’ll miss it,” McCarthy said. “I miss a lot of components of it already. But my sole responsibility is to make sure I can help Kellen be the best play-caller possible. So it’s the best decision for this football team. There is so much more that I want to and need to focus on as far as building the program the way I see it needs to be done. There’s a lot of energy that goes through it, and I just didn’t want to short the offense. I felt like I did that at times in Green Bay.”
McCarthy brought 11 new coaches with him to Dallas, including some with former head coaching experience in special teams coach John Fassel, offensive line coach Joe Philbin, defensive coordinator Mike Nolan and defensive line coach Jim Tomsula.
The experience of the new staff is one reason pundits expect the Cowboys to be much-improved in 2020.
Owner Jerry Jones openly lamented last season about failures of the coaching staff under Jason Garrett for being outcoached and outschemed.
The Cowboys are hoping that doesn’t happen in 2020.
Ironically, one of the keys to the team’s success rests with one of the few holdovers in Moore, who is just in his second season as an offensive coordinator/play caller.
McCarthy pointed to the success the Cowboys had last season under Moore, finishing first in the league in yards, and his relationship with quarterback Dak Prescott, who had a career-high 4,902 yards passing and 30 touchdowns.
Moore was a backup quarterback when Prescott was a rookie in 2016. He was Prescott’s quarterbacks coach in 2018 before being promoted to offensive coordinator in 2019.
“I mean, frankly when I came here on my interview Kellen Moore was part of my initial thought process to put this staff in place,” McCarthy said. “So this was a Day 1 decision. ... Kellen was a big part of the equation as the offensive coordinator and frankly that was based on the decision of the development of Dak and where I felt that he was and what he’s accomplished over the last four years. ...
“They have an excellent foundation and I think we’re doing a very good job building off what was accomplished last year and we’ve applied it to the new direction of this offense. By all indications, I think Dak is very comfortable and very confident with Kellen.”
McCarthy, a noted quarterback guru who has mentored the Super Bowl-champion likes of Joe Montana, Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers, made a point to talk to Prescott about the quarterback-coordinator and why he kept Moore.
“I had a talk early on with McCarthy, just the importance of it being Kellen’s show and the way that he does things,” Prescott said. “The majority of the quarterbacks you look in the league that have had a lot of success have stayed in the same system, so that was the big importance for him, was to keep me and the rest of this offense in the same system and take what we’ve done over the past few years and grow on that.”
McCarthy also has done his best to get out of the way and not step on Moore’s toes, while melding his system from Green Bay with what the Cowboys did last year.
Moore said having McCarthy’s blessing has been a confidence boost.
“Mike has obviously done this for a long time, had a ton of success in Green Bay and many other places. It’s been great for me,” he said. “I think more than anything I’ve been fortunate he’s given me that opportunity to kind of lead the way while still being able to ask him all of those different questions, all of those circumstances, hey, how did you do this this way, or do you do this a different way? We just keep bouncing ideas and conversations together. I was very fortunate to be in that situation because there are a lot of different ways of doing things, a lot of different ways we can grow and develop. It’s been fun for me.”
One of the things McCarthy said he learned late in his career in Green Bay is the need to empower his coaches.
And he has done that with Moore in terms of installing the offense and calling the plays.
“At the end of the day, and I can’t state this enough, Kellen Moore, he’s the coordinator, and he’s the play caller,” McCarthy said.
