
Former NFL team president: “Jerry’s dream of winning a Super Bowl is dead without major changes.”
“I’m not under any unusual timeframe at all,” Jerry Jones said when prompted about announcing possible coaching changes.
That may be an attempt by Jerry to slow-play the process or it may be an unwillingness by both Jerry and Stephen (more on him in a minute) to step outside of their comfort zone.
And into this snuggly Jones family kumbayah moment, former Eagles and Browns President and CEO Joe Banner drops this little nugget:
Eagles HC & coordinators contribute way more to winning. I have a lot of respect for you, but Jers dream of winning a SB is dead without major changes. Look at top teams HC & coordinators, almost all better than Dallas. KC, Detroit, Bills, Ravens, Vikings, Eagles all much better https://t.co/HksFay0zId
— Joe Banner (@JoeBanner13) December 31, 2024
That is a big indictment of the current coaching staff, and if the Joneses are seriously thinking of bringing back Mike McCarthy, the Cowboys will get outcoached in big games and against big teams as has regularly happened during McCarthy’s tenure.
But the issue in Dallas isn’t just about this year’s coaching staff.
If you have high-quality assistants and coordinators, eventually they’ll be offered a promotion by another team – which is exactly what happened with Dan Quinn when Washington hired him as their new head coach last year. And if you have a high-quality coaching staff that type of thing should be happening regularly. Maybe not every year, maybe not every two years. But maybe more than once in 18 years, right?
That’s right, outside of Dan Quinn, not a single Cowboys coordinator under three successive head coaches (Wade Phillips, Jason Garrett, Mike McCarthy) over a span of 18 seasons was promoted into a head coaching job with another team.
But it’s not just the absence of future head coaches among the assistant coaching ranks that should raise all sorts of alarms. The fate of former Cowboys offensive and defensive coordinators (Dan Quinn’s potential move to a HC position notwithstanding) once they leave Dallas is an unmitigated disaster and is a flaming indictment of the Cowboys front office.
Let’s look at the defensive coordinators the Cowboys have paraded through Dallas since 2007 – with a special emphasis on what happened to them after their tenure in Dallas ended.
- Wade Phillips (2007-2010). Phillips was HC and DC in one, and once fired during the 2010 season, Phillips signed up as DC in Houston (2011-2013), was completely out of the NFL for a year, and followed that up with DC stints with the Broncos (2015-16) and Rams (2017-19) and reemerged in 2023 as a head coach in the XFL/UFL.
- Paul Pasqualoni (2010). Pasqualoni briefly took over as DC when Phillips was fired and was out of the NFL immediately after that. After three years as a college head coach, he resurfaced in the NFL as a DL coach with various teams, and even made it back to DC briefly with the Lions (2018-19).
- Rob Ryan (2011-2012). Followed up his two-year gig in Dallas with three years in New Orleans (2013-2015), and one more year in Buffalo (2016) before sitting out for three years before his next NFL job and has been team-hopping in various assistant roles since.
- Monte Kiffin (2013-2014). After just one year, Kiffin was demoted as DC in favor of Rod Marinelli, but hung around as “assistant head coach for defense” for another year. He was out of the NFL before signing on with Jacksonville in 2016.
- Rod Marinelli (2013-2019). Marinelli took over as DC in 2014 and stayed until 2019 before moving on to the Raiders and taking a step down to DL coach.
- Mike Nolan (2020). McCarthy’s hand-picked DC delivered the worst defensive performance in team history. He was out of the NFL after that and only resurfaced in 2023 as a head coach in the UFL.
- Dan Quinn (2021) is the one guy that broke the trend. He’s the first Dallas DC since 2007 not to take a demotion or to be out of the NFL shortly after his stay in Dallas.
When the Cowboys initially hired all these coordinators, they thought they were getting experienced veterans with institutional knowledge and demonstrated success in the past, almost all with former head-coaching experience.
What they got instead were mostly retreads long past their prime just a step or two removed from the end of their NFL careers.
Sad enough that they keep falling into the same predictable trap at DC, but the pattern repeats at offensive coordinator as well. Sure, they had two promoted-from-within guys in Jason Garrett and Kellen Moore who seem to break the mold (at least from an age perspective), but do they really?
- Jason Garrett (2007-2019). We tend to forget that Garrett was a hot commodity as a young OC back in the day. After the 2007 season he was offered the head coaching jobs in Baltimore and Atlanta but stayed in Dallas. Detroit, Denver and St. Louis inquired about Garrett the next season, but he again preferred to stay in Dallas and took over as head coach in 2011. After his tenure in Dallas, Garret had lost all his sparkle and signed on with the Giants as OC for two years, but has been out of the NFL since.
- Bill Callahan (2012-2014), a former head coach for the Raiders, was hired in 2012 as an OL coach, took over play-calling duties from Garrett in 2013, and was himself stripped of play-calling duties in 2014. Callahan stepped back down to OL coach for Washington (2015-2019), before moving on to Cleveland as an OL coach in 2020 and to Tennessee in 2024.
- Scott Linehan (2014-2018), a former head coach for the Rams, took over play-calling duties from 2015-2018, and has been out of the NFL since.
- Kellen Moore (2018-2022) was promoted to OC after Linehan left, and despite “lighting up the scoreboard” in Dallas and garnering multiple HC interviews, he only managed a lateral move to be the Chargers OC for a year, and followed that up with another lateral move to OC in Philly. At least he isn’t out of the NFL yet.
What we see here, with the possible exception of Garrett and Moore, is a consistent modus operandi by the Cowboys front office that favors former head coaches and/or established veteran coaches with big names. Names that come with one important benefit for the Cowboys from office: they signal competence by association.
“Look at us, we know football! Heck, we know it so well, we only hire the biggest names in the business.”
Over the last 10 or so years, Stephen Jones has taken over more and more control of the day-to-day football operations in Dallas, even if fans routinely love to crucify Jerry Jones for anything that goes wrong with the Cowboys. And while 82-year-old Jerry retains all the fancy titles in the organization, Stephen is the guy running things behind the scenes.
Stephen has been involved with the Cowboys most of his adult life (he was 24 when his father bought the Cowboys in 1989), but he did not inherit Jerry’s penchant for taking risks. In fact, Stephen is running the Cowboys about as conservatively as possible, which is evident in the way the team handles player contracts and the salary cap, avoids free agency like the plague, was late to the game in analytics, and in the way they go ultra-conservative with their coaching hires.
The Cowboys don’t like to sign an up-and-coming college guy as one of their coordinators – it’s too risky. They don’t want a bunch of unproven assistants with new ideas on their staff – it’s too risky. And they certainly don’t want some hotshot coach challenging the status quo in Dallas – it’s too risky.
Or as Bryan Broaddus said last year on 105.3 The Fan: “They don’t want to change.”
They don’t want Bill Belichick walking in here, they don’t want Jim Harbaugh walking in here and saying, “we need to do this differently personnel-wise. I don’t like the way we’re doing this personnel-wise. I don’t like this!” They don’t want that.
They don’t want that. It’s eeeeasy for them now. Mike [McCarthy] is not going to get in their way about personnel. Mike is not going to get in their way and say, “Hey, we need to do something different here.” He’s not! He’s not going to do it differently.
It’s totally comfortable for the way these guys operate. They don’t have anybody questioning their personnel moves. They get to draft, they get to sign players, their own players. They don’t do things the guy in Philadelphia does – or people who are fighting for their jobs.
That’s what this football team is. They handed it off from a guy who used to do crazy things (and I was part of the crazy things he did!). The crazy stuff will get you fired. But he handed it off, and that’s where we are now. They don’t want to change. Because they’re comfortable in the way they are operating.
So they settle for the easy options on their coaching staff, and hope that by sticking with big names with a big past, some of that past glory will magically rub off on them.
But in a league that thrives on risk-taking and innovation, going conservative on your coaching will get you exactly to where the Cowboys are: 29 years and counting since the last conference championship game.
Joe Banner is right, the Cowboys need some major changes on their coaching staff.
Or you could just bring in another retread who was a big deal 10 years ago. Because it’s comfortable.
Heck, you could could even stick with McCarthy. Even some of the key players on the roster are openly supporting McCarthy’s return.
Looks like everybody has gotten just a little too comfortable in Dallas.