Apologies for those who remember this from last offseason, but:
| Mike McCarthy | Sean Payton | |
| Career Wins | 167 | 160 |
| Career Win Percentage | 0.620 | 0.623 |
| Career Playoff W–L | 11–11 | 9–8 |
| Super Bowl Titles | 1 | 1 |
With that out there…
I know we’re out of the era where everyone drools over Sean Payton, because we’re now seeing him coach again and speak to the public again, things which remind us how 1) he isn’t all that great and 2) he’s a pretty big asshole. But. While Mike McCarthy isn’t a great coach either, he, like Sean Payton, is in the ‘good coach’ category within his era, and the recent slander against the guy is overblown. People just don’t realize how much he’s won.
Since winning their fifth Super Bowl in 1995, the Cowboys have failed to make the NFC Championship. This is a jarring level of failure, all the more so because it came on suddenly. They’ve made the playoffs 13 times in that span. They’ve played in the Divisional round in seven of those years. Under Barry Switzer, Chan Gailey, Bill Parcells, Wade Phillips, Jason Garrett, and now Mike McCarthy (Dave Campo never made the playoffs at all), the Cowboys have routinely lost in the playoffs. Is this something that’s wrong with the Cowboys? We’ll get into that in a moment. Is this something that’s unique to Mike McCarthy? Of course not.
It was fair to speculate about Jerry Jones firing McCarthy. A move like that would fit Jerry Jones’s identity. But the reason it would fit Jones’s identity is the same reason all this McCarthy vitriol is so silly: It would have been ridiculous to fire Mike McCarthy this week.
McCarthy’s teams have gone 12–5 now in three consecutive regular seasons, his third, fourth, and fifth in Dallas. In the other 24 seasons between that Super Bowl title and today, the Cowboys only went 11–5 or better four times. They did it in 2007, 2009, 2014, 2016, and now in 2021, 2022, and 2023. This is the best the Cowboys have been over a sustained stretch since they were one of the NFL’s great dynasties. Mike McCarthy is not doing a bad job.
We promised to look at the Cowboys’ playoff failure. It’s around the worst in the league. Here’s every team’s regular season win percentage and total playoff wins since that last Cowboys Super Bowl:
You’ll notice that the Cowboys share a data point with the Minnesota Vikings, coming in perfectly alongside one another over these last 28 years. You’ll notice that the Cowboys, Vikings, and Dolphins are the three furthest teams from the trend line in the underachieving direction, a phenomenon unaffected by the line sitting a little artificially to the left because the Browns and Texans didn’t play in every single one of these seasons. You’ll also notice, though, that the Cowboys aren’t outside the bounds of normalcy. There is one outlier on this chart, and it’s the grandest dynasty the NFL has ever seen.
Have the Cowboys been surprisingly bad in the playoffs? Yes. Is this a perfect way to measure that? No. For one thing, it’s raw wins, not wins above or below seed-line expectation. For another, we’re defining the sample arbitrarily in the way that reflects most poorly on the Cowboys. Move our starting point back a year, and the Cowboys have three more playoff wins. Move it back four years, and they’re probably on the other side of the line.
Mike McCarthy might not win a Super Bowl in Dallas. He might not be good enough to do that in today’s NFL. If you believe you should only hire coaches definitely capable of winning a Super Bowl, though, your candidate list won’t exist, and beyond that, there’s an incongruence in saying that 1) coaching under Jerry Jones is hard and 2) Mike McCarthy is doing a terrible job when he’s 36–15 over the last three regular seasons. He got upset twice in the playoffs in three years. That’s a stupidly small sample. This is like when college basketball media only evaluates coaches based off of their record in the NCAA Tournament. It leads to things like Rodney Terry trying to defend Texas’s honor last night at the press conference because his team couldn’t defend its own basket on the court.
What Does Success Look Like for Remaining Playoff Teams?
On Friday, we ranked the playoff teams by desperation: Who wants this Super Bowl the most? The Cowboys were second on that list. They, the 5th-ranked Dolphins, and the 7th-ranked Browns were the three most desperate who went down. Remaining? These guys:
1. San Francisco 49ers
3. Baltimore Ravens
4. Buffalo Bills
6. Kansas City Chiefs
8. Detroit Lions
9. Tampa Bay Buccaneers
10. Houston Texans
11. Green Bay Packers
If you reverse these rankings, you get the House Money rankings, which would illustrate how little the Packers and Texans have to lose as they go to San Francisco and Baltimore on Saturday. But rather than do that, we want to identify the threshold at which each of these teams makes this year a success. We’ve got four categories: You’ve either already achieved success, you need one more win, you need to make the Super Bowl, or you need to win the whole thing.
Already Successful: Lions, Bucs, Texans, Packers
The Lions are the questionable one on here. Would it stink to have gone through all that celebration about Sunday only to lose the ultimate trap game this weekend? Yes. But the Lions aren’t a top Super Bowl contender, and they’ve already done the thing they most needed to do, which was winning a playoff game. It would be a gutting end to this season’s story, and it would become a huge what-if should the Lions fail to build on this season’s performance, but I don’t think the Lions’ season becomes a failure if they lose on Sunday.
One More Win: Bills, Chiefs
This is tricky. We’ll start with the Bills.
The Bills have two humps to get over. One is finally winning that Super Bowl. One is getting past Patrick Mahomes.
The Bills have only played Patrick Mahomes twice in the playoffs in this Josh Allen era. This is the third time. But three is where a trend becomes a bogeyman. Like the Packers to the Cowboys and the Niners to the Packers, the Chiefs will be that Bills bogeyman if the Bills lose this game.
Oddly for the Bills, they could probably lose next week to the Ravens and be fine with how it ended. They’d have made it back to their 2020 season’s peak, and they’d have rallied from an atrocious start to finish the season as the third-best team in football. If they win next week, or if they play the Texans, the situation changes, but for now the Bills just need one more win to call this season a success. If they were playing the Ravens this week instead of next week, they wouldn’t even need this one win.
For the Chiefs, it’s more about saving the season from being a failure. The Chiefs have reached the AFC Championship five straight times. This regular season was already the worst of any of these last six years. If they don’t reach the AFC Championship, they’re falling short of their own standard.
Is it a high standard?
Of course.
But that’s what makes them what they are right now.
Make the Super Bowl: Ravens
Super Bowls are hard to attain, and Lamar Jackson’s yet to win one. Jackson is young enough, though, and the Ravens have won multiple titles recently enough, that if they make it to the Super Bowl and lose to the 49ers, it’s going to be hard to be too upset. Are they the best team in the NFL? The way college sports’ top 25 polls work, yes. They beat the Niners head-to-head and their starters haven’t lost since November. It’s unclear, though, if they’d be favored in a rematch if the two made the Super Bowl. It could change, but right now, the Ravens need two more wins, not three.
Win the Super Bowl: 49ers
By contrast, the Niners have an even longer Super Bowl drought than the Cowboys do, and making it recently doesn’t help things all that much. Kyle Shanahan still wears a black eye for not winning the big one when he’s previously had the chances. They’re getting a lot of organizational coverage right now, too—pieces about “The 49er Way” which look pretty awkward if you don’t win a title. Is the future bright? Yes. But it’s been bright before.
How Much Talent Is Alabama Losing?
There’s a lot of hand-wringing about Alabama and the transfer portal, and it’s not unwarranted. They’ve got two former five-star recruits in there and upwards of a dozen former four-stars. Last season, only 19 teams in the entire country had multiple five-stars on their roster, and the number of programs bringing in as many four-stars through recruiting as Alabama is losing to through transfer is around the single digits. Alabama is losing a good program’s worth of talent. But Alabama had a lot of talent to begin with.
Alabama’s roster was the only one in the country last year to boast more five-star recruits than three-stars. Alabama’s roster was the only one in the country with more than 13 five-stars on it, and one of just two with more than ten. Looking at the Talent Composite, Alabama’s roster was as much better than Texas’s in the realm of size, speed and strength as Texas’s was better than UNC’s. Texas was ranked 6th in that Composite. UNC was ranked 17th.
The Talent Composite isn’t perfect—age matters some, and recruits do develop or fail to develop—but the point here is that Alabama is uniquely well-equipped to weather a talent drain on the transfer portal side.
Where I’d be more concerned, if I were Alabama, would be on the side of the NFL Draft. Five of the top 25 prospects (going by PFF) in this spring’s draft are Alabama guys. Only three other schools have multiple players in that top 25 (LSU, Washington, and Georgia), and none of those has more than three. Alabama is losing talent through the portal, but it’s taking a bigger hit through its players aging out of college football.
Where does this all leave the Tide, on paper? It’s hard to say. The 2024 Talent Composite isn’t up yet, and we’ll want to do our own adjustments based on age, but my guess would be that given the recruiting class is still very good, and given the program is bringing in a few transfers of its own, and given just how big a lead these guys had on the rest of the country in terms of talent…they’ll still be in the top four, there with Georgia and Texas and Ohio State. That’s a guess, though, and the bigger worry is what comes next. Because now, Kalen DeBoer and his staff will have to do the recruiting themselves, and next year figures to be tough for outgoing transfers as well, and the NFL Draft only stops calling when you stop producing talent. If the Tide fall to even the edge of the Talent top ten come 2025, that’s going to put them right in the middle of the SEC.
I’m not worried about Alabama’s talent in 2024. The transition is a big question, but the talent will be there.
I’m worried about Alabama’s talent in 2025.
In Chicago
- The Blackhawks play the Sabres tonight, and one thing I personally keep forgetting is that the Hawks have the Lightning’s first round pick. It’s protected, but the Lightning are right in that sweet spot outside the top ten as things stand right now. Hopefully they hold at the deadline or get out-tanked if they do sell. Still almost two months from that.
- The Bulls play the Pascal Siakam-less Raptors, and it’s in Toronto but the Bulls are favored because the Raptors understand how the NBA works and dealt Siakam. The Bulls’ situation isn’t perfectly parallel—Siakam was approaching free agency, and the Bulls’ chips (much to our chagrin over here) have not been—but the Raptors are only 2.5 games back of the Bulls in the standings. Also, having players with more years left on their contracts should theoretically make those players more valuable.
- I don’t know how seriously to take the White Sox’ new stadium rumor (they’re looking at a spot by the river in the South Loop), mostly because I don’t really think the current stadium is anywhere in the White Sox’ top 100 problems, but if they build a great new park a little closer to downtown, good for them. It seems like it’d be cooler if they invested in the deeper South Side, but that’s easy to say as a Cubs fan. The Cubs lucked into the easier neighborhood to navigate.
