Dallas Cowboys Head Coach Mike McCarthy opened up about his job status for nearly 10 minutes in a provocative interview on Tuesday.
Cowboys owner and GM Jerry Jones made headlines at the Senior Bowl earlier this month when he remarked that defensive coordinator Dan Quinn would, “love to be the head coach of the Cowboys,” before adding that McCarthy, “knows that someday, somebody other than him will be coach of the Cowboys.”
McCarthy joined the Rich Eisen Show on Tuesday and responded to the comments publicly for the first time.
“The way things are done here, there's a, a bigger picture focus,” McCarthy told Eisen. “I've always kind of taken a blind eye, or blind ear to those things. But that’s not the case when you work here.”
McCarthy said he had a frank conversation with Quinn about the chatter before he was retained, and that Quinn wanted to make sure his presence wasn’t problematic for McCarthy.
“We kind of laughed about it, and I just said, ‘Dan, 10 to 12 years ago, I'd tell you please get the hell out of here, I don't want to deal with this,’ but the reality of it is I'm about winning. He's about winning. And the best thing for the Cowboys is for Dan Quinn to be here.”
While McCarthy is happy to have Quinn back in 2022, he did acknowledge that the questions about his job status aren’t optimal.
“Are these narratives unusual? Absolutely. I've never dealt with anything like this. Do I wish I didn't have to come on here and answer questions about it? Yeah, no doubt about it. I wish we were talking about something else, but it's part of our landscape.”
McCarthy added that he’s spoken with Jones since his comments at Senior Bowl, and that he feels comfortable with where they’re at.
“We talked about Dan's situation. We talked about Sean Payton's narrative also. It's been discussed,” McCarthy said. “I'm very comfortable with our relationship and our dialogue.”