Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy has employed a different theme for each of his seasons with the team. In his first year, it was “20/20 Vision.” The next year, “Victory.” The 2022 rallying cry was “Resilience,” and last season implored the team to “Carpe omnia.”
The 2024 mantra has been revealed, and this one seems to be landing a bit differently.
The word is “Rooted,” the coach told reporters on Wednesday.
While the previous mottoes were forward-looking and could be seen as encouraging a particular mindset or play style, this one feels very introspective. Reflective. Based in the past.
And, it has to be said, maybe more than a little self-serving for McCarthy, who will be coaching to keep his job all season long.
“It’s based on the foundation we’ve built here over five years,” he said, per the team website. “I got good advice from my father about living your life in five-year increments, and what you can learn in that time and space, to not do too much too fast. It’s more of a life lesson. We’re in the fifth year of what we’ve done and what we have to build off of as part of the root system that’s in place here.”
But what, exactly, are the 2024 Cowboys rooted in?
Cynically speaking, they’ve certainly established a knack for regular-season success over inferior opponents, only to be followed by a disappointing premature collapse in January.
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To be sure, a foundation is there. Three consecutive 12-win seasons aren’t nothing, as McCarthy himself pointed out in stark terms recently. Stephen Jones called it “hanging around the rim” not too long ago.
But that’s clearly not enough, or else McCarthy wouldn’t be coaching this season without a contract for 2025.
Are there plenty of teams who would love three straight 12-win seasons? Of course there are. But if the Cowboys don’t venture any deeper into the postseason this time around, McCarthy could well be interviewing with some of them come February.
That would mean putting down new roots for the NFC’s fourth-longest-tenured head coach.
The 60-year-old may feel rooted in what he’s grown in Dallas, but he and some or all of his coaching staff- also working without a net- could find themselves transplants in new cities if this season doesn’t bear fruit.
Rooted may be the team’s slogan for 2024, but it also feels very much like the coach’s plea to Jerry Jones to stay the course beyond this season.
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How much will his players buy in to the theme anyway? Of the 53 men who will presumably make up the Cowboys’ Week 1 roster, only 10 of them- that’s 19%- have been wearing the star for McCarthy’s entire Dallas tenure.
And six of those 10 are currently set to hit free agency in 2025, so how deep are those roots, really?
Similarly, how rooted are this year’s rookies in the seeds that McCarthy and the team’s veteran leaders were dutifully planting in 2020? Tyler Guyton and Caelen Carson were freshmen still getting settled in their college dorm rooms.
And forget trying to draw on any sort of ties to the franchise’s larger, more illustrious history. The last of those five Lombardi Trophies they walk past every day in The Star’s lobby, for example, had already been sitting in the display case and collecting six years worth of dust before they were even born.
But rooted does imply an anticipation of growth. And plants that are well-rooted are better equipped to handle stressors like drought and extreme temperature, under- or overwatering, disease, and neglect.
The ’24 Cowboys will no doubt get more than their fair share of stress this make-or-break season. And the younger players can always look to their more experienced teammates- the Dak Prescotts, the DeMarcus Lawrences, the Jourdan Lewises, the Zack Martins- for cues on how to withstand those times.
But the coach got even more specific on what he expects to grow out of his newly-chosen theme, even dropping some horticulture knowledge of his own.
He referenced a certain type of bamboo tree that takes four years to fully establish itself in the ground. Then, in the fifth year, it explodes: one inch or more in less than an hour, three feet in a day, well over 80 feet in a month.
Is that what McCarthy is hoping to see from the Cowboys in his own fifth year? Obviously.
It may be the only thing that keeps him firmly planted in Dallas.
