The Dallas Cowboys Embarrass Yet Again

Jerry Jones once again thinks he's the smartest guy in the room.

1995.

That was the last season that the Dallas Cowboys made the NFC Championship game.

Brian Schottenheimer, who was named the 10th head coach in the history of the franchise, had just finished his junior season as a quarterback on Steve Spurrier’s Florida Gators football team. The Gators would win the first of their three national titles the following season.

There were four teams in the championship round of the league this past weekend. The Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Washington Commanders, and the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the Buffalo Bills.

Those teams are quarterbacked by four of the biggest talents in the league.

Only one of those four were born the last time the Cowboys made it to the NFC Championship game round.

Patrick Mahomes was four months old.

I was in the midst of my first semester at the University of Texas, paying a little over $500 for an efficiency apartment near the Crown and Anchor.

So excuse me if during the press conference announcing the Schottenheimer hire Monday morning one word kept coming up that made me want to vomit.

“Continuity”

Continuity of what?

It is continuity that has ruined this once proud franchise. The general manager has been employed for all 29 of those years. His right hand man has also held that job for 29 years.

It is continuity that ruined the 2024 season. The Cowboys were run out of the playoffs after the 2023 season. It would have been perfectly justified to fire Mike McCarthy after that debacle.

He was brought back.

But he was given Ezekiel Elliot to work with. His defense was gutted with very little investment in replacing what was lost. Big holes on in the wide receiver room and the offensive line were ignored, or foolishly thought rookies could step in and protect their biggest investment at quarterback.

That quarterback was only given that investment after the team hemmed and hawed and did exactly what everyone in the metroplex knew that they had to do, which is pay Dak Prescott. Same deal with wide receiver CeeDee Lamb. The Cowboys waited until the California portion of training camp was done to get both deals done.

The move freed up millions in salary cap relief, when they claimed poverty all off-season. Sure, they can roll those millions in next season’s cap, but for an owner and general manager to come out and say “we’re all in” and then repeatedly kick his fanbase in the shins all off-season, it is just another grievance in a long list that for many Cowboys fans, it is just enough.

We were tired of it.

And then came this latest fiasco.

I’m sure Brian Schottenheimer is a fine man.

But he’s not a NFL head coach.

Schottenheimer has been in the league off and on for 20 years (with a stint for one year at Georgia), mostly as an offensive coordinator, and not one that was known for high flying offenses. In fact, he hadn’t been a serious candidate for a head coaching position for more than a decade, when he flirted with the Buffalo Bills before staying with the New York Jets.

It was on one of those “off” periods that the Cowboys and Mike McCarthy found Schottenheimer three years ago, when he was hired as an analyst. He was promoted to offensive coordinator after one year, and for the last two years was the Cowboys’ offensive coordinator.

Who didn’t call plays.

Which he will in Dallas now.

So why the flirtation to bring back Mike McCarthy at all, if HE was clearly the problem in Dallas?

The NFL is a brutal business. If you don’t have a Patrick Mahomes or a Tom Brady, a transcendent talent at quarterback, you had better be doing a constant review of your roster and a top to bottom evaluation of every facet of your organization every year, because you have to assume the 31 other teams in the league are doing so.

So no, interviewing four candidates, with two of them being a Rooney Rule obligation, is not doing your due diligence. Terms were not released on the Schottenheimer deal quite yet, but Mike McCarthy was making $4 million a year, so we can assume his deal is at or lower than that, which puts him about in the lower half of NFL coaches.

Andy Reid makes $20 million. His counterpart in the Super Bowl, Eagles head coach Nick Sirriani? He’s making $7 million (which is only good enough for 10th in the league these days).

The NFL has no salary cap on coaching staffs or training staffs or support staffs. Jerry Jones could pay his head coach $25 million, could find the best person on the planet for the job, and the league couldn’t do a thing about it.

But he constantly searches for the cheapest option.

The worst thing to ever happen to Jerry Jones was for the Cowboys to win Super Bowls and he himself not get the credit. And he’s determined to never experience that again.

It is malpractice, pure and simple.