The Dallas Cowboys are a bad football team and getting worse, quickly. They are 3-6 after their latest loss at the hands of the division rival Philadelphia Eagles, their fourth defeat in a row. They haven’t scored more than 24 points since Week 3, their star quarterback is out for the season, their star wide receiver is banged up, they are still without several of their best defensive players… you get the idea. Their season is, for all intents and purposes, done. They are merely playing out the string, both on the 2024 campaign and, likely, Mike McCarthy’s tenure as head coach.
Dallas hired McCarthy in 2020 and gave him an incredibly low bar to clear: Go further in the playoffs than Jason Garrett did in his decade (!) as head coach. McCarthy lost Dak Prescott for the season early in his debut year with the Cowboys, but his teams then lost to the 49ers in back to back seasons, once in the first round and once in the divisional round, before getting blown off the field by the Packers last year — with all of those losses coming at home in AT&T Stadium. In the final year of his deal, McCarthy is coaching his worst Cowboys team yet.
That preamble brings us to Friday afternoon. During his weekly radio appearance (the owner has a weekly radio appearance!), Jones was — for some reason — asked if former Cowboys tight end Jason Witten could be an NFL head coach. And he took the opportunity to answer in exactly the way that you’d expect he would, if you have been following anything Jones has said over the past three-plus decades.
“Yes. Without hesitation, yes,” Jones said, via DallasCowboys.com. “He has something you can’t draw up, reminds me a lot of our other tight end, he’s the head coach up at Detroit right now.”
This is yet another sign that Jones just does not get it.
He’s pretty clearly laying the initial groundwork here to eventually hire Witten to coach the Cowboys. (Even if not necessarily this offseason.) He thinks that because Dan Campbell is a former Cowboys tight end and Witten is a former Cowboys tight end, that you can draw a straight line between the two.
He’s ignoring the fact that Witten has yet to coach at any level above high school (he did win a state championship), while Campbell spent 11 years as an NFL assistant in Miami and New Orleans, eventually working his way up to the “assistant head coach” title along with his position-coach responsibilities. All that was before getting his first head-coaching opportunity with the Lions. (He also went 5-7 as the interim head coach for the Dolphins in 2015.) But what matters to Jones is being able to say that they were Cowboys tight ends, like that really means anything.
He once again thinks that reaching into the past for someone with a connection to the team is the solution to his franchise’s woes, just as he did back in 2011 with (former Cowboys quarterback) Jason Garrett, and this past offseason by thrusting (former Cowboys defensive coordinator in the 1990s) Mike Zimmer on Mike McCarthy as his defensive coordinator. He also hired Garrett as offensive coordinator and head-coach-in-waiting before ever hiring Wade Phillips as head coach, then insisted on McCarthy keeping (former Cowboys quarterback) Kellen Moore as his offensive coordinator when taking the job in 2020. Neither of those solutions went all that well, because “previous connection to the franchise” is not an appropriate criteria for a coaching job. (Moore’s offenses were good, but he and McCarthy were never a personality or scheme fit.)
Even when the Cowboys look outside the cocoon for their coaching hires, they only barely do so, and they’re only really pretending. After allowing Garrett’s contract to expire (they didn’t even fire him!), Dallas conducted only one interview with former Bengals coach Marvin Lewis before hiring McCarthy free and clear. It was a process that was explicitly designed to hire McCarthy — who had beaten the Cowboys in their own building in two playoff games and won a Super Bowl there with the Packers, which is the kind of thing that matters to Jerry Jones — while technically complying with the Rooney Rule. They didn’t conduct a real search, because they didn’t want to. They wanted to hire McCarthy so they found a way to do it without subjecting themselves to league discipline.
Eventually, you’ll likely see something similar happen with Witten. Or with Deion Sanders. Or somebody else who used to play or work for the Cowboys in some capacity.
Ordinarily, you’d expect that a team with Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb, Micah Parsons, Trevon Diggs, Daron Bland, Tyler Smith and more could have its pick of head-coaching hires; and that with a real search, could land on someone who would do the job well. But as we have seen in the past, the Cowboys don’t operate that way. They’re not looking for a head coach of a football team so much as they are looking for someone who can prepare a group of players for a series of football games from which Jones can market and profit.