The Cowboys got crushed for hiring Brian Schottenheimer. Did they deserve it?

( Editors note: This is excerpted from Mike Sandos Pick Six of Jan.

27, 2025.) Schottenheimer is a perfect fit for the Cowboys as an insider familiar with how the organization operates.

That is why so many pushed back against the hire.

They want real change in Dallas, not a continuation of the current model featuring Jerry Jones as the year-round face of the franchise, minus any evidence of urgency.

Advertisement Three decades ago, Jones said he could find 500 coaches to lead his team.

More recently, Jones has told other owners that teams are eating too many lucrative contracts for fired coaches.

This was another way of saying teams overvalue coaches when pursuing the hottest names.

Jones is correct to a point.

His coaches have won whenever the organization had upper-tier quarterbacks, which has been almost all of the time, except for the early 2000s after Troy Aikman retired.

The four coaches Jones hired before Schottenheimer Mike McCarthy, Jason Garrett, Wade Phillips and Bill Parcells were among the most successful of their hiring cycles.

McCarthy is the only coach from the 2020 class with a winning record.

Garrett won more games than any coach hired in the 2011 cycle while ranking third in win rate (.556) behind John Fox (.719), who teamed with Peyton Manning in Denver, and Jim Harbaugh (.695), who revived San Francisco.

Phillips (.607) had the second-best win rate for any coach hired in 2007, trailing Mike Tomlin (.630).

Parcells (.531) had the best record for any coach from the 2003 cycle.

Which brings us to Schottenheimer.

The 51-year-old son of 200-game winner Marty Schottenheimer owns 203 NFL games (including playoffs) of play-calling experience over 12 seasons with three teams (that excludes the past two seasons, when McCarthy called plays in Dallas).

The offense he coordinated in Seattle from 2018 to 20 averaged 26.1 points per game in the regular season, third-best since 2000 for any play-calling coordinator with 40-plus games on a team, per TruMedia.

Two hot names from this hiring cycle, Ben Johnson and Kellen Moore, are in the top four.

Those coaches are younger.

Time will tell if they fare better.

It shouldnt shock anyone if Schottenheimer wins more games over the next two seasons than Johnson wins with the Chicago Bears.

Hes got the established quarterback and is taking over a team that owned the NFLs second-best record from 2021 to 23, before falling off in 2024.

That is only part of the point here.

The manner in which Jones casually let McCarthy walk, only to replace him with a McCarthy assistant, was the owners way of tripling down on business as usual in Dallas.

The Eagles are about to head back to the Super Bowl, but don't worry gang, Stephen Jones says they'll have salary cap issues at some point so whose to say who is really running their franchise the right away Tom Downey (@WhatGoingDowney) January 26, 2025 Jones, under this approach, has failed to reach the conference championship round since the 1995 season, the longest drought for any team in the NFC.

But the Cowboys rank among the NFLs top 10 in win rate over the past five, 10, 15 and 20 seasons.

With all the Aikmans and the Romos and the Daks, someone is falling into a Tier 2 quarterback or higher every time, an exec from another team said.

You are going to be in the mix whether you hire Jason Garrett, Mike McCarthy or really anyone.

(Photo: Sam Hodde / Getty Images).

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