By Saad Yousuf, Jon Machota, Dianna Russini and Cale Clinton

Mike McCarthy won’t return as Dallas Cowboys coach in 2025, owner and general manager Jerry Jones said Monday, as the franchise will move in a new direction after a five-year run that included three playoff appearances but failed to end the team’s three-decade Super Bowl drought.

McCarthy’s contract officially expires Tuesday, but Jones said in a statement Monday the two sides did not discuss a new contract after meeting to review the last season and path forward.

“Prior to reaching the point of contract negotations, though, it became mutually clear that it would be better for each of us to head in a different direction,” Jones said.

The move comes after the Cowboys missed the playoffs for the first time since McCarthy’s inaugural season in 2020. McCarthy, who won a Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers in 2010, led Dallas to success when having a complete team around him, winning 12 games in three consecutive seasons from 2021 to 2023 and winning the NFC East twice. In seasons in which franchise quarterback Dak Prescott was healthy, McCarthy consistently led some of the best regular-season teams in the NFL. With a record of 49-35, McCarthy ends his tenure in Dallas with the fourth-highest regular-season win percentage (59.8 percent) in Cowboys history.

The issue McCarthy consistently ran into, however, was advancing in the playoffs. McCarthy won just one postseason game in five years, continuing Dallas’ now-29-year streak of not making a conference championship game. The regular-season success and postseason exits resembled his predecessor, Jason Garrett, who went 85-67 in the regular season but won only one playoff game in his final five seasons, leading the Cowboys to move on from him after the 2019 season.

The biggest blow during McCarthy’s five years was a 48-32 wild-card loss to the Green Bay Packers last January. The No. 2 seed Cowboys, who won the NFC East, were dominated by the No. 7 seed Packers at AT&T Stadium. Despite Dallas riding a league-best 16-game home-winning streak, Green Bay led 27-0 late in the first half and 48-16 midway through the fourth quarter. There was speculation after that game that Jones could fire McCarthy with a year left on his contract. Although Jones stuck with the coach for another year, he didn’t do much in the offseason to improve the roster.

Dallas started just 3-5 this season, then lost Prescott for the rest of the year because of a partially torn hamstring. The Cowboys finished 7-10, including a 2-7 mark at home.

After a one-year hiatus following his dismissal from the Packers, McCarthy replaced Garrett in 2020. Jones said one of the Cowboys’ primary goals was to focus on a “proven team builder and winner” who had a “proven track record of winning, not only consistently but at the highest level.”

McCarthy’s inaugural 2020 season was all but lost just five weeks into the season when Prescott suffered a gruesome season-ending ankle injury. The team’s new defensive scheme also struggled, finishing as one of the NFL’s worst units, as Dallas finished 6-10.

Over the next three seasons, the Cowboys were excellent at full strength. Dallas’ 36-15 regular-season record over that span was second only to the Kansas City Chiefs (37-14), and the Cowboys led the league in scoring twice. They built quality teams through the draft early in McCarthy’s tenure, adding cornerstone players like wide receiver CeeDee Lamb, cornerback Trevon Diggs, defensive end Micah Parsons and left guard Tyler Smith. They weren’t significant free-agency spenders during that time. Their most notable trades both happened during the 2023 offseason, adding veteran WR Brandin Cooks and veteran CB Stephon Gilmore.

But despite McCarthy’s past successes in the playoffs — he went 10-8 with Green Bay — Dallas’ lone win in five years came in the 2022 wild-card round, a 31-14 victory over an eight-win Tampa Bay Buccaneers team in what ended up being the final game of Tom Brady’s career.

The McCarthy era was also very open to change on the coaching staff. After the 2020 season, McCarthy quickly moved on from defensive coordinator Mike Nolan in favor of Dan Quinn. The Cowboys jumped from 27th to fourth in defensive DVOA during Quinn’s first season. Quinn posted three straight seasons of top-five defensive DVOA performances before taking a head-coaching job in Washington this past season. McCarthy retained Kellen Moore as his offensive coordinator upon joining the staff in 2020. Moore posted a top-five offensive DVOA in 2021 once Prescott was healthy, but a downturn in 2022 led to Moore and the Cowboys parting ways. McCarthy hired Brian Schottenheimer and reclaimed play-calling duties for himself, returning to the precedent set in his Green Bay days. The Cowboys finished ninth in offensive DVOA in McCarthy’s first season as play caller before falling back to 26th in 2024.

How playoff failures led to this moment

Before McCarthy, the Cowboys had gone through high win totals, followed by quick playoff exits. Wade Phillips did that in 2007 with a 13-win, one-and-done team. Garrett did the same in 2016, with another 13-win squad. The 2014 team won 12 games and a playoff game but still didn’t reach the conference title game. Other Cowboys teams preceding McCarthy had flirted with the playoffs fairly routinely.

The standard was clearly set for McCarthy when he took the job in 2020: Win playoff games. Plural.

In the end, that standard was not met. There were plenty of excuses for things going off the rails this year, just as there were in 2020. In both cases, injuries topped the list. However, it’s the three years in the middle which crushed the case for the Cowboys to extend McCarthy and build upon the culture he established.

While playoff exits to the San Francisco 49ers in 2021 and 2022 were heartbreaking in their own way, they don’t compare to the black stain that is the playoff loss to the Packers in the 2023 season. That loss to McCarthy’s old team is arguably the worst postseason loss in franchise history. It was an embarrassing display by the Cowboys, the No. 2 seed, against a young Packers team that just snuck into the playoffs as the No. 7 seed. The Cowboys’ offense and defense both failed to show up that day, despite all of the circumstances lining up in Dallas’ favor.

While Jones brought McCarthy back to coach out the final year of his contract, the 2024 season was a failure almost from the start, with the Cowboys getting blown out at home in Week 2 by the New Orleans Saints, who would fire their coach midseason.

For a long time, it was the Cowboys, Detroit Lions and Washington Commanders that were mentioned as teams with a long conference championship appearance drought. The Lions snapped out of that group last season. The Commanders are ascending and in the postseason this year. The Cowboys’ drought continues. — Saad Yousuf, Cowboys staff writer

What’s next for the Cowboys?

It’s unknown if Dallas will conduct an expansive search or interview only a few candidates to find their 10th head coach in franchise history. After deciding to move on from Garrett, the Cowboys interviewed only two coaches, McCarthy and Marvin Lewis. Garrett took over after Phillips was fired in 2010. When Phillips was hired in 2007, the Cowboys interviewed 10 candidates for the job.

The most popular name at this time is Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson. But the interviews could include a wide range of candidates. There are former NFL head coaches like Brian Flores, Kliff Kingsbury, Ron Rivera, Pete Carroll and possibly even Jon Gruden. And then there are current coordinators with no head-coaching experience like Aaron Glenn, Liam Coen and Joe Brady. None are close to being an obvious choice.

It seems highly unlikely that he would be interested in hiring someone directly from the college game, even though the two coaches he won Super Bowls with — Jimmy Johnson and Barry Switzer — were both hired without any NFL coaching experience. Jones, who turned 82 in October, is much more likely to hire not only someone with NFL experience, but also NFL head-coaching experience.

“You’ve got a choice,” Jones said after hiring McCarthy. “You can get in that foxhole with somebody that hasn’t been shot at it. You can get in there with somebody that’s been shot at. Or you can get in there with somebody that’s been shot at and hit and is still going. Now, that’s the one I want to be in there with.” — Jon Machota, Cowboys staff writer

(Photo: Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)