Cowboys News: Mike McCarthy Says OC Kellen Moore Will Call Plays Next Season

New Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy told reporters Thursday that offensive coordinator Kellen Moore will call the team's plays next season.   

Ian Rapoport of NFL Network added that giving Moore play-calling duties was "one of the ways Dallas lured him back from other job offers."

Moore, 31, took over as the Cowboys quarterbacks coach in 2018 and was promoted to offensive coordinator in 2019. Under his watch, Dallas finished this season first in yards per game (431.5) and sixth in points per game (27.1). 

Despite those numbers, however, the Cowboys went just 8-8 and missed the postseason for the seventh time in the past 10 seasons. That was ultimately the undoing of former head coach Jason Garrett, who won just two playoff games since taking over as head coach in 2010. 

There was little doubt the Cowboys would seek to keep Moore in Dallas given his success so early in his coaching career. The question, however, was whether McCarthy would handle the play-calling duties after doing so for the majority of his tenure as the Green Bay Packers head coach or if he would hand the reins over to Moore. 

McCarthy even said in 2016 that he would never give up play-calling duties again after he did so with the Packers the season prior. And he didn't hide his affinity for being a play-caller after he was hired in Dallas, either:

It's possible, of course, that owner and de facto general manager Jerry Jones wanted to keep Moore at all costs and made McCarthy agree to relinquish the play-calling duties as a condition of his hiring. Jones essentially groomed Garrett to become the team's head coach after he came up through the organization as a bright offensive mind, so it's possible he's taking a similar approach with Moore.

It's also possible McCarthy simply evaluated the Dallas offense and decided against interfering too much with a unit that had success. 

"Between us, we can take this offense forward another step," he said Thursday of his pairing with Moore, per ESPN's Todd Archer.