Colin Cowherd Compares Mike McCarthy to Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick, Other Great NFL Coaches

The biggest winner from Monday night’s Wild Card matchup between the Dallas Cowboys and Tampa Bay Buccaneers was Mike McCarthy. If the Cowboys had lost, an entire week’s worth of news cycles would have been solely dedicated to tearing him down and asking when Jerry Jones was going to fire him. Jones probably would have done so and McCarthy would be jobless after taking a reputation hit.

Instead, the narrative is charging headlong in the opposite direction. Colin Cowherd is the conductor of that particular train as he made the argument that McCarthy is actually underappreciated as a head coach. He did so by blindly comparing resumes, throwing McCarthy’s career numbers against luminaries like Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick, Andy Reid, and Pete Carroll. This segment will undoubtedly upset some folks.

Cowherd’s argument is not that McCarthy deserves a spot on the NFL coaching pantheon along with the rest of these guys. He is just trying to make the point that McCarthy has a pretty bad reputation for a guy who has won a lot.

However! Cowherd ignores the driving force behind McCarthy’s bad reputation– he has always had a good quarterback to work with and does not succeed at a rate that the quality of quarterback would suggest. Any of the coaches listed would have won more than one Super Bowl with Aaron Rodgers. It is too early to make any definitive claims about McCarthy’s tenure with the Cowboys but it is safe to assume that Bill Belichick would have his team in a far better place right now if Mac Jones was as good as Dak Prescott.

Could McCarthy get his team to the playoffs if he had Geno Smith as his quarterback? Quincy Carter? The animated corpse of Ben Roethlisberger? Mac Jones? Even Alex Smith, who was definitely good under Andy Reid but not at Prescott’s level? The coaches McCarthy is compared to managed to do that with those names. It is legitimate to question if he is capable of doing the same.

Again, that wasn’t really Cowherd’s point. But it’s something to keep in mind when throwing numbers without context up there.