Dak Prescott has advocated for Mike McCarthy to return in 2025.

There are five weeks left in this NFL season. Time really does fly.

At the moment it is still possible that the Dallas Cowboys are playing beyond that, but there is obviously a lot that would go into them reaching the playoffs at this point in time. Consensus is that when the regular season finishes, so will they.

Whenever this season does come to a close for the Cowboys they are going to be faced with an important decision relative to the franchise: Who is going to be the head coach?

We have talked ad nauseam for almost a full year now about Mike McCarthy and his future, and it is important to note that the reason this is the case is because the Cowboys specifically chose to charge into this season with him in the final year of his contract, knowing full well the elephant in the room that it would create.

Lessons about last offseason’s entirety can be learned without having to fully re-litigate it, but for what it is worth there is one person who has voiced an opinion on the future head coach and it is the one who is currently signed with the team on the biggest contract in NFL history.

Dak Prescott wants Mike McCarthy back, believes he deserves a chance ‘on his terms’

We can say right now that you would be hard pressed to find anyone associated with the Dallas Cowboys who would say that they want someone other than Mike McCarthy to be the head coach in 2025. Advocating for him can be a nice thing, but it does fall into the literalness of “what else do you expect them to say?” type of thing.

Now that we have established this, it is certainly worth noting that Dak Prescott sat down with Yahoo Sports and publicly endorsed Mike McCarthy as the head coach of the Cowboys.

“Your coach seems like he’s playing on his last contract and [I’m] almost feeling helpless like I can’t help him in this situation, especially a guy you believe in so much and you believe in being your head coach,” Prescott told Yahoo Sports during a Tuesday afternoon Zoom call. “Control what I can control, help and support Mike to every extent that I can.”

…

“I believe in him wholeheartedly,” Prescott said, speaking in partnership with DICK’S Sporting Goods. “I don’t want to necessarily get into the nuts and the screws of it all obviously, but I think he definitely deserves a chance — another contract and a chance to coach this team amongst more influence. ‘On his terms’ may be a good way to say it.

“But I wholeheartedly believe in him.”

The subject of Dak Prescott can be a divisive one, but something that should be included in any kind of thought with this whole subject is that he has shown a remarkable ability over his career to be very aware of his status as the quarterback for America’s Team. He is extremely cautious with what he says because he knows the attention that it generates. This is why it was so strange, to reference one example, when he publicly leaned into fans throwing debris at officials following the playoff loss to the San Francisco 49ers (the first one). My point here is that he does not get caught saying something that he does not feel comfortable reaching the public sphere.

Given this context, it is certainly notable that Prescott not only advocated for McCarthy, but that he specifically went as far as saying that Mike deserves a chance to coach the team “on his terms.” If you want to see the inflection which which Dak said it, and the pause for how he gathered his thoughts right before, you can go to the 1:05 mark of this clip. Prescott is specifically asked what he wants fans to know about his belief in McCarthy for further context.

Again, we do not need to re-hash the offseason, but it is not exactly a secret that it was a disaster for the Cowboys. It is not hyperbole to say that it set the head coach, Mike McCarthy clearly, up rather poorly. To reiterate again here, strapping him to the rocket and forcing him to blast off in a contract year was the ultimate ingredient to yield chaos and while the team has some good vibes going with a two-game winning streak right now (tied for their longest of the year) that is exactly what happened. Predictably.

It is hard to imagine there is any accomplishable thing that McCarthy’s Cowboys could do across the rest of this season that would automatically warrant an extension. You can argue that if he wasn’t worth one following three consecutive 12-5 seasons, admittedly with an all-time bad playoff loss on top of it all, back in January that this season has only pushed him in the other direction.

But perhaps there is some sense of guilt (lol) among the front office to the point where they feel like they have the right guy in place and just need to actually, oh I don’t know, do their jobs themselves so that he can be set up better.

It seems Dak Prescott may somewhat agree.