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Cowboys Select McCarthy as New Coach

Mike McCarthy goes from having Aaron Rodgers as his quarterback to Dak Prescott
Bill Huber|
Cowboys Select McCarthy as New Coach
Cowboys Select McCarthy as New Coach

Cowboys beat writer Mike Fisher contributed to this story.

FRISCO - The Dallas Cowboys have selected Mike McCarthy as their next head coach.

The Dallas interview with McCarthy, the former Packers head coach, began on Saturday and continued on Sunday, we're told.

McCarthy, who will be replacing Jason Garrett, spent 13 seasons as the Green Bay head coach, where he won a Super Bowl and had a 125-77-2 record. In Dallas, the Jones family will have him team with QB Dak Prescott as he did with Aaron Rodgers. Yes, there was McCarthy/Rodgers conflict. But the rewards were positive ... just as the Cowboys' weekend-long visit with McCarthy clearly was.

McCarthy guided the Packers to a Super Bowl championship in 2010 - a game played in Dallas - and three other trips to NFC Championship Games. From 2009 through 2016, the Packers and Patriots were the only teams to reach the playoffs eight consecutive seasons.

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At the time of his firing last season, McCarthy's 125 regular-season wins ranked 27th in NFL history. Of the coaches ahead of him, only seven could beat McCarthy’s winning percentage, a list that includes Hall of Famers Don Shula (.677), George Halas (.682), Curly Lambeau (.631), Paul Brown (.672) and Tony Dungy (.668), plus certain Hall of Fame Bill Belichick (.681) and Hall of Fame candidate Bill Cowher (.623).

"Let's just state the facts: I'm a highly successful NFL head coach," McCarthy said during the team's rocky start to 2016, a season that ended in the NFC Championship Game. "With that, I've never looked at the ride to this point as smooth or whatever the words you used. To me, it's always bumpy, and to me that's the joy of it. That's this game. That's how hard it is in the NFL. Really, what you did last year or 2010, as we know, doesn't factor."

McCarthy should like having owner Jerry Jones out front for all football matters. Because former general manager Ted Thompson preferred to stay behind the scenes, it was up to McCarthy to field personnel questions throughout the season. A perfect example was when Thompson released Pro Bowl guard Josh Sitton before the 2016 season. It was up to McCarthy to answer for that transaction, something that irked the coach.

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Bill Huber
BILL HUBER

Bill Huber, who has covered the Green Bay Packers since 2008, is the publisher of Packers On SI, a Sports Illustrated channel. E-mail: packwriter2002@yahoo.com History: Huber took over Packer Central in August 2019. Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillHuberNFL Background: Huber graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he played on the football team, in 1995. He worked in newspapers in Reedsburg, Wisconsin Dells and Shawano before working at The Green Bay News-Chronicle and Green Bay Press-Gazette from 1998 through 2008. With The News-Chronicle, he won several awards for his commentaries and page design. In 2008, he took over as editor of Packer Report Magazine, which was founded by Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke, and PackerReport.com. In 2019, he took over the new Sports Illustrated site Packer Central, which he has grown into one of the largest sites in the Sports Illustrated Media Group.

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