A Titans Head Coaching Profile: Mike McCarthy

Mike McCarthy is the former head coach of the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers and has the biggest profile out of anyone who is potentially up for the Titans’ job. If anything, he may be the most vanilla, boring candidate I cover because, well, we know what we’re getting from him. He’s a professional who’s done the job before, and even though the chances are he’s not gonna lead the next big dynasty or anything, he’ll be stable and get the job done. This is one where I’m confident a big majority of people will not be too upset about the idea, but more bored with it. It’s the easy connection; he’s what everyone in the building seems to want, and he is an offensive mind, which, even though management doesn’t seem to care which side of the ball the person leans, it would probably be smart to at least think about Cam Ward’s development in this hire. That brings the question, though, can Mike McCarthy be the man to develop Ward into a good if not great QB? Well, that’s in some ways what this article is for: I present the positives and negatives along with the coach’s background, and I let y’all choose. So, without any further interruption, this is the Mike McCarthy head coaching profile

Mike McCarthy’s background

First off, let’s take a look at his coaching background and how we got to this point. McCarthy got his start all the way back in the ripe year of 1987 as a grad assistant at a small college called Fort Hays State. After spending two years there, McCarthy went on to be a grad assistant at Pitt from 1989 to 1991 and was then promoted to receivers coach in 1992. After his stint at Pitt, McCarthy was then hired to be the Offensive quality control coach for the Kansas City Chiefs in 1993 and 1994, then was promoted to be the quarterbacks coach from 1995-1998. He left for the same position with the Packers for just the 1999 season because after this, he got a huge job. The New Orleans Saints hired Mike McCarthy as their next Offensive Coordinator, where he would stay for the same time as the first term for President George Bush (2000-2004). His offenses in New Orleans ranked 10th, 13th, 3rd, and 14th, and the year after he left, the offense ranked 30th. He went on to leave his job with the Saints to work with the San Francisco 49ers for the 2005 season, where his offense ranked the worst it had been at 30th in the league, a down year, but it didn’t stop his next move. In 2006, the Green Bay Packers decided to hire Mike McCarthy as their next head coach, and he would stay there until 2018. I’ll cover most of his stuff here in the positive and negative sections of this article. All I’ll say here is, he won a Super Bowl with the Packers, and exited unceremoniously. After his years with the Green Bay Packers, he took a year off from the game to learn the analytical side of the game. After that year off, Jerry Jones offered him the head coaching job with the Dallas Cowboys, which he took. He stayed there until 2024, where he had three 12-win seasons and then caught beef with Jerry Jones thanks to a contract dispute, which led to them parting ways after the 2024 season. He did well enough in Dallas to the point where there are many teams that are willing to give McCarthy one last chance at a head coaching job, and that comes with a lot of positives.

Mike McCarthy’s positives

Mike McCarthy doesn’t really have the most flashy or exciting positives of all the head coaching candidates, but they’re very important for the next Titans coach. The first thing, and the thing that makes him a favorite for the job, is the stability he brings alongside the experience with two, let’s just say, different organizations. Love or hate the man, he has a lot of experience, and not in the Robert Saleh or Matt Nagy way, where they both had experience, but not good experience. With McCarthy, he has multiple winning seasons and has been as consistent as they come. When he was in Green Bay, even if they had some down years, the team was usually pretty competitive as a whole, and he would get the most out of his offense every year. He went to the Cowboys, and similar things continued where (after an injury-riddled year one) he had three 12-win seasons in a row, and when Cooper Rush had to go in, the team stayed pretty competitive overall. Think about that, Mike McCarthy had a competitive season last year, with Cooper Rush starting half of the Cowboys’ games. That is something we’ve wanted since Mike Vrabel left, a coach who can keep our team consistently competitive. Another big positive that comes from the McCarthy hire is his offensive mind. Again, like I’ve said in the past, even though I lean toward an offensive mind, I really don’t care who the coach is, and what background he has, as long as he’s a strong, culture-building coach, I’m good with it.McCarthy, though, is one of the people who makes me want an offensive mind a lot more than I probably should. In his years as a head coach in the NFL, his offenses were top 10 in the league 9 times in his 17 seasons. The point is, none of his offenses were truly terrible, and he was usually a competent play caller. The last thing I’ll say actually isn’t about something he does when he’s with the team, but instead about something that happens with his teams once he is gone. Look, I know this isn’t the most amazing point for a head coach, but whenever you look at the teams he’s gone to, they end up having a similar pattern. McCarthy comes in, he does really well, stables the ship, consistently makes the playoffs, and after a couple of years, the organization finally decides that they need to maximize their ceiling, so this leads to McCarthys firing/retirement and then the organization has replaced him with a higher ceiling guy that was ten times better than he was (ie Matt LaFleur and Brian Schottenheimer). The point is, hire McCarthy now, and maybe get a great offensive mind later, because now we know what to look for in a great head coach. Now, obviously, this isn’t an exact science or anything, I mean, the Cowboys kind of lucked into Schottenheimer in some ways, and the Packers are one of the better-run organizations in the NFL. Still, though, bringing in McCarthy could help the front office in the next head coaching cycle, and it could be a teaching experience in what to look for in a new, more youthful head coach of this team. It’s a game of patience with McCarthy, you bring him in to stable the ship, then you’re more confident when seeing a graphic about the Titans hiring a Declan Doyle (28 year old Chicago Bears Offensive Coordinator) or a Davis Webb (Denver Broncos Passing Game Coordinator), or heck, maybe even Grant Udinski is still available then (Jacksonville Jaguars Offensive Coordinator), credit to Connor Orr for mentioning these guys at the end of his article on Titans head coaching candidates. Again, McCarthy might not be flashy, but he may very well be your safest chance for your organization to become relevant once more.

Negatives of Mike McCarthy

Now, even with McCarthy’s proposed stability and a hopeful future, he still has some red flags that need to be addressed. The first thing I’ll mention is probably the most obvious negative with McCarthy, and that’s Father Time itself. Look, there’s no secret that McCarthy is on the older side for a head coach. At 62 years old, it’s easy to think that Mike McCarthy might not be around too much longer, and that doesn’t give him too much time to truly build a culture with the Titans. Personally, it would shock me if he made it past six seasons with the Titans if he were to land the job. This age can also lead to some feelings of laziness when it comes to the dedication he has to the job. His age and the way that he acts make me curious if he even has the fire needed to get this organization back on track. Even then, though, when I see a guy like Jon Gruden (who I will not cover unless he is hired or even interviewed), I know that if he were to get the job, he is, at the very least, gonna bring some fire to this team that desperately needs it. I worry about that with the McCarthy route because he doesn’t come off as a motivated guy, and no, I’m not trying to confirm the thoughts of a radio host who says no one is interested in McCarthy because he’s overweight, I think Andy Reid comes off as completely motivated and he seems like he has a fire, and I just don’t feel that way about McCarthy. The next thing that I think is worth mentioning is his clock management skills. This is something that has consistently popped up in McCarthy’s career and is something we know we’re gonna get if he ends up being the guy the Titans choose. Not too many specific examples come to mind, but there is one very specific example that still haunts Dallas Cowboys fans to this day, that being against the San Francisco 49ers in the 2021 playoffs, where the Cowboys looked like they were driving their way into a great comeback and then McCarthy and Co. call a QB draw at the end of the game, don’t get the snap off, and their season was over just like that. That’s the type of stuff that bad coaches do with clock management, and it makes me worried that he’s gonna do that stuff with us and not have the talent to back it up. Now, he could have very easily learned from his clock management mistakes of the past, but chances are, if he’s getting a third chance, he probably hasn’t learned from that mistake. The last thing I’ll mention is the discipline that his teams have had. When he was with the Cowboys, his teams ranked 11th, 1st, 9th, 3rd, and 4th in most penalties during the season. His teams consistently ranked at the top in the absolute worst way when it came to penalties. I mean, the best they ranked in his tenure was 11th, for context, in the best of the Vrabel years, his teams never ranked that high. I try not to talk about that era too much anymore, but it’s something worth mentioning. The worry is, usually, teams that are disciplined usually give the sign of a good head coach, and McCarthy just never had a disciplined team in his last few years as a head coach. Even with McCarthy’s positives, we still know what we’re getting, and some of the negatives will start to annoy us over time. It’s happened with him everywhere else.

How likely is McCarthy to get hired?

You know this is a little weird right now. When I first started writing this, I was gonna very confidently gonna put down that McCarthy was the easy favorite for this head coaching job. Now, though, I have no idea what to think. I know Connor Orr said that McCarthy was seen as the frontrunner in building for the job, but then Schefter went on 104.5 The Zone and he said almost everybody that has been connected to the job, except McCarthy. Do I still think that McCarthy is the favorite to land this job? Yes, but I’m not as confident as I was before writing this. Now, that goes from me being confident enough to tell someone to bet on it, to being still confident, but not enough to put money on it. How would I feel about the Titans making this hire? Well, I would really like it. The Titans have already been bad enough to the point where I would love to get a dude who’s made the playoffs and be ok with not having as much success, especially if it does lead to the Titans getting a great offensive mind along the lines of Webb, Doyle, Udinski, Scheelhaase (LA Rams passing game coordinator), or some other offensive mind we don’t even know about yet. That would set up our future very well, and it would do absolute wonders for the future of the team.

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