How Mike McCarthy’s offense in Green Bay stacks up against the Cowboys offense

The Dallas Cowboys have been a successful team in the regular season over the past two decades. They have compiled 183 total wins during that span ranking inside the top 10, one spot behind the Kansas City Chiefs and one spot ahead of the Philadelphia Eagles. Of course, regular season success doesn’t mean a whole lot if the team struggles come playoff time. And rest assured, the Cowboys indeed struggle. Dallas is 4-10 in the playoffs over the last 20 years with a winning percentage of 28.6%, ranking them in the bottom five.

The team once again enters an offseason trying to find the missing piece to their puzzle. They’ve made trades on both sides of the ball to help improve their passing game, and they drafted a player in each of the first six rounds who all play integral roles in the running game.

While the team has addressed areas of weakness on the roster, they’ve also made a big change in coaching as Mike McCarthy will now be calling plays instead of the recently departed Kellen Moore. There are a lot of different feelings about this change ranging all over the place. Some appreciated what the younger Moore has done while others have grown tired of him. Regardless of where you are with that, this is McCarthy’s offense now, and we are about to see how that plays out.

Before the answers start revealing themselves, we thought it would be helpful to take a look at some numbers and gauge how good was he in Green Bay, how good the Cowboys were during that same time, and where were the offensive struggles for both teams over the years. To kick things off, let’s look at the Green Bay Packers offensive DVOA dating back to 2006 when McCarthy first started calling plays for them (stats courtesy of Football Outsiders). We’ve also included team records and the number of games their starting quarterback played for context.

As you can see, McCarthy has a good résumé of success calling plays for the Packers. In his 13 seasons with the Packers, he called the plays in 12 of them with the lone exception being in 2015 when Tom Clements took things over. Clements’ offense registered a 2.7% DVOA which is the third worst over that span, only being eclipsed by McCarthy’s first year in Green Bay and in 2017 when Aaron Rodgers missed more than half the season. In those other ten seasons, McCarthy’s offense finished 11th or better in all of them, including six years within the top five.

We can also see that Matt LaFleur finished 11th or better in all four of his seasons with Green Bay including a first- and second-place finish in 2020 and 2021 respectively. You could make an argument that Aaron Rodgers has a lot to do with that, but at the same time LaFleur is viewed as one of the better play-callers in the NFL, so judge accordingly.

During that same 17-year window, how did the Dallas Cowboys do on offense? Let’s have a look.

Strolling down memory lane tells us a lot of things we already know. Jason Garrett, Scott Linehan, and Kellen Moore have been exceptional at times, but also downright horrid when either Tony Romo or Dak Prescott gets hurt. It’s not lost on us that Kellen + a healthy Dak has been pretty fantastic.

Putting the data together and ranking the top 10 offensive performances gives us the following...

This list includes a little bit of everyone with McCarthy’s offense showing up the most with four appearances in this top 10. Of course, he has anywhere from twice to three times the tenure of calling plays as these other guys so that seems reasonable.

Looking through this data tells us that there isn’t any reason to believe that McCarthy won’t be good at calling plays. He should be. At the same time, the Cowboys haven’t shown a real deficiency in their ability to call plays either, other than their obvious struggles when their starting quarterback goes down. Despite the Cowboys' offensive success in the past, they’ve still stalled. McCarthy was brought to Dallas to get them over that hump and even with two straight 12-win seasons, he’s fallen into that same wheel-spinning playoff trap that others before him have succumbed to.

The range of outcomes of this story goes anywhere from McCarthy being stagnant like his final days in Green Bay when Rodgers would ignore McCarthy’s plays in lieu of his own to where he’s this great offensive revelation in Dallas. And even if he does turn things around, this team must perform when it counts for it to mean anything. McCarthy’s lone Super Bowl appearance came in 2010 when the Packers finished the year 10-6, but turned it up in the playoffs. Of course, a little good fortune doesn’t hurt as they were on the right side of three playoff games decided by one score or less.

The Cowboys have had answers in September through December, and while McCarthy’s play-calling may help them get better, the challenge remains what they can do in January. Unless that changes, he’ll be no different than the other guys.