A strong showing in Philadephia needed to save Garrett’s job
Updated Friday, November 9
LLANO, Texas — Unlike the Maras in New York, Rooneys in Pittsburgh and a few other NFL owners, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys has a quick trigger finger when it comes to firing coaches. He terminated Tom Landry before he even met him. Didn’t matter that Landry was destined for the Hall of Fame.
Jones stayed with Barry Switzer for only four seasons, even though one of them included a Super Bowl championship.
So how has Jason Garrett lasted eight years? He’s been to the playoffs just three times, never reaching the conference championship game. The only team he’s ever beaten in the postseason is the Detroit Lions.
Google “Jason Garrett” and you will see a roster of headlines proclaiming him a Dead Coach Walking. We are halfway through a second disappointing Cowboys season after 2016 looked so promising. Back then the Cowboys had the league’s two splashiest rookies, quarterback Dak Prescott and running back Zeke Elliott, both seemingly destined to be All-Pro.
Neither accomplished much Monday night when Dallas lost at home 28-14, to a team, Tennessee, that had lost three straight games, even one to the miserable Buffalo Bills.
So the 52-year-old Garrett was subjected to another round of derision from the national media.
Kevin Gilbride, retired NFL coach who now works for NFL Network, observed that the Cowboys do not take advantage of Elliott’s ground threat to develop a play-action passing game. “Schematically things could be done to help him be a little more effective,” Gilbride said on NBC Sports’ Pro Football Talk.
Peter King of NBC Sports would like to see not just more fakes to Elliott but more actual touches: “I don’t care about the score, all I care about is getting the ball into the hands of your best player. Ezekiel Elliott touched the ball six times in the second half. If I’m Jerry Jones, that would really bother me.”
Although Jones did not publicly rebuke Garrett’s coaching in Monday’s nationally televised game, he had done so the week before, saying his team should not have punted late in the fourth quarter but should have tried on 4th-and-1.
Terry Bradshaw and Terrell Owens are among those who in the past have advocated replacing Garrett, saying he does not have the respect and confidence of many of his players. What respect he might have is undermined by Jones, who’s constantly consulting with the players and making whatever personnel decisions he wants. He is, after all the general manager.
Like any head coach in trouble, Garrett tries to survive by blaming his assistants. He fired offensive line coach Paul Anderson last week, which was a bye, an opportunity for the Cowboys to freshen up, regroup and pull to .500 as a 6-point favorite against punchless Tennessee. Boosting the cause: the acquisition last week of one of football’s fastest receivers, Amari Cooper.
Give Garrett credit for smoothly assimilating Cooper into the offense. He caught 5 passes for 51 yards and a touchdown against the defensively stout Titans.
The O-line change didn’t go as well. Marc Colombo replaced Anderson, but there was no improvement in the blocking Monday night. Prescott was sacked 5 times; Elliott averaged 3.6 yards per rush.
Fans wondered why the Cowboys, now 3-5, were so flat coming off the bye. Was that a product of their coach being less than fully committed? Garrett left his team to attend a World Series game in Los Angeles. It was not a good look.
It brought to mind a similar bye-week episode of years ago. The weekend before the Cowboys were to play the New York Giants on the road, Tony Romo was in Mexico cavorting with Jessica Simpson. The Giants used that as motivation and thrashed the Cowboys.
The World Series jaunt was among the least of Garrett’s mistakes. He’s constantly blowing his challenges and reshuffling his lineup and trying to change the identity of his team. They don’t know who they are.
Jones did provide him one bit of good advice: make use of Prescott in the running game, especially in short yardage and in the red zone. But Monday night the quarterback ran only twice—compared to 10 times by his Titans counterpart, Marcus Mariota.
Jones insisted he will not change coaches before the end of the season. But he’s said that before.
He once made the same promise about Wade Phillips but fired him precisely eight years ago, when he was 1-7 and had just lost a prime-time game to Green Bay. As irony would have it, that’s when Garrett got his chance to become a head coach.
To be fair, Garrett has not been a total failure, at 70-58. But for a franchise steeped in Super Bowl tradition and self-importance, this is not acceptable.
Charean Williams, Hall of Fame football reporter and long-time Cowboys insider, believes a whipping by the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday night could do to Garrett what the loss to the Packers did to Phillips in 2010.
Elliott and teammates are calling the intradivision game in Philadelphia “must win.” As Williams sees it, public opinion is blowing strongly against Garrett, and she said, on PFT, “There is no doubt Jerry listens to the public. . . . And he changes his mind a lot.”
The reason Garrett may make it to the season’s finish is that he has no assistants that are obvious head-coaching material. Speculation is that if Garrett leaves the interim job probably would go to defensive coordinator Rod Marinelli, who was 10-38 as a head coach for the Detroit Lions.
Looking to next season, Jones may want to do something bold, like bring in a younger perspective. Lincoln Riley, 35, Oklahoma Sooners head coach, and Jeff Brohm, 47, of Purdue, are attracting rave reviews for their recent work.
But Troy Aikman, the Cowboys’ Hall of Fame quarterback who’s now the lead game commentator for Fox, thinks the team’s main problem is that Jones has his fingers in everything. There’s no chain of command from the head coach to the assistants to the players. Jones talks to everyone.
“I’ve talked to people inside the building who have a pretty good idea of how things are run,” Aikman said. “There’s a lot of dysfunction, and that has to change if this team is going to compete on a consistent basis. . . . There has to be a complete overhaul of the entire organization.”
