Don’t Blame Brian Schottenhiemer for Jerry Jones Turning Dallas’s Coaching Search into A Joke

It’s time to wake up. It’s time to stop buying the $300 authentic jerseys and the $170 Starter jackets. It’s time to stop flying to Oxnard—although many of you have already made that decision—and it’s time to stop fawning over this sun-blinded space station plopped in the middle of some vacant farmland and surrounded by strip mall vacuum cleaners calibrated to suck the money out of your pockets. It’s time to stop the tours. It’s time to stop dropping triple digits just to park. It’s time to stop the sycophancy, believing that the billionaires atop this football pyramid scheme are about a single thing other than improving the bottom line.

In hiring Brian Schottenheimer, the Dallas Cowboys aren’t even trying to sell hope like other self-respecting NFL franchises. The Jones family had an affinity for Dan Quinn, allowed him to walk, and watched as Quinn roared to the NFC championship game with the Washington Commanders. They played chicken with Mike McCarthy at the bargaining table and lost him, too, only to feign interest in Deion Sanders for publicity’s sake and hire McCarthy’s offensive coordinator who was there all along.

With absolutely no risk of losing Schottenheimer to another head coaching job, the Jones family didn’t even bother to wait out conference championship weekend, where any of the eight coordinators—Bobby Babich, Joe Brady, Vic Fangio, Kellen Moore, Steve Spagnuolo, Matt Nagy, Kliff Kingsbury or Joe Whitt Jr.—would have represented some encouraging twist in the search process. Or at least a sign that someone was turning the lights on at the Star—the Cowboys’ practice facility—every once and a while.

Let me be very clear by saying this: I don’t have a problem with Schottenheimer the person, and I am willing to have my mind changed on him as a head coach devoid of this situation in particular. The success of a head coach is conditional on so many outside factors and is impossible to predict at the outset. Schottenheimer, too, is one of the rare people in this business that you’ll find who is almost universally well-liked. Perhaps that sentiment was expressed by the players. Jones also came to power in the NFL at a time when Schottenheimer’s father, Marty, a former All-Star player in the pre-merger era who twice won coach of the year and has one of the largest and most influential coaching trees in modern NFL history, was routinely posting winning seasons.

But if Jones even had the slightest inkling of Schottenehimer being a quality head coach, why did he not promote him to the job during this lost and injury-riddled 2024 season knowing full well that he would even make a reasonable effort to keep McCarthy in the first place? If this was all part of some 3D chess maneuver, why does it look more like the end of Monopoly, where someone is squeezing tight some last remaining dollar bills before getting stomped out by the owners of Park Place?

That’s where the focus should be. That’s where you should train your eyes. That’s what you should be mad about. This is why you should check out until these owners check back in. It’s not about the result. It’s about the process by which we arrive at one confounding decision after another. Wait to pay the players until the market spikes. Overpay for those players to convince yourself you can’t afford helpful free agents. And, now, dismiss the head coach and hire his offensive coordinator when, at any point over the past two seasons, that offensive coordinator could have been your head coach and had a trial run already.

Don’t “old takes expose” me when the Cowboys are 3–1 next season and everything appears fine because the team possesses three of the best players on the planet. I covered the 2010 New York Jets, a team that featured Schottenheimer as an offensive coordinator at a point when Schottenheimer had legitimate head coaching prospects. The league is cyclical and I don’t doubt his ability to field a winning football team, though Schottenheimer has fielded just four of 14 seasons as an offensive coordinator with a top-10 finish in points scored (and only two top-10 finishes in total yards, and only one top-10 finish in net passing yards per attempt).

You should be mad because Dallas has “interviewed” six—six—candidates for what the Jones family bills as the largest and most (self) important sports franchise in the world. Other teams nearly hit 20 candidates. The Cowboys did not even surface in the Ben Johnson conversation. They did not interview Brian Flores, who fell out of favor in Miami because he won too many games with a roster built to tank. They did not interview Liam Coen, the only offensive coordinator since 2000 to score more than 28 points per game, and six or more yards per play and a 65% rate in the red zone or better and a 50% or better third down conversion percentage. They did not interview Aaron Glenn, a former Cowboy from Humble, Texas. They did not interview Todd Monken, whose artful play-calling helped turn Lamar Jackson into a perennial MVP candidate. They did not interview Kingsbury, a Texas native responsible for the best quarterback coaching job of the season. They essentially had Bill Belichick fawning over them on television a year ago and watched as he took a job at the University of North Carolina. On the team’s website, the Sanders publicity stunt got the Colorado head coach listed as an official candidate. Hence, the air quotes around the word interview. This search was a farce.

To boot, the Jones empire is forcing Schottenheimer to play from behind, which is a large part of where my animus comes from. The public sentiment surrounding this hire is abhorrent. It’s beyond alarm. His leash will be shorter than a lepton. If his clock management isn’t perfect, if his offense lags, you’ll feel ready to riot.

Don’t fall for the okie doke, though. If it doesn’t look right, if you’re down double digits in the fourth quarter, if this offense is running into a brick wall, don’t boo toward the sideline. Don’t blame Schottenheimer. Turn around and find your nearest owner’s box.

Jerry Jones, the league’s great showman, the orchestrator of all media attention, was so excited about this hire that he allowed the news to drop at 10 p.m. ET on a Friday night, when most of the people who would care are either out enjoying their night or asleep on the couch. But like we said, it’s time to wake up. If there was any last Cowboys fan among you standing who believed this ownership group was interested in fielding the best team possible, that owner just told you exactly what he thought of you.

Now, it’s time to return the favor.