The NFL’s 2025 head coaching carousel is nearly finished spinning, and even though the Dallas Cowboys are hiring Brian Schottenheimer as their new head coach, the supposedly proud franchise remains stuck in place, too mired in Jerry Jones’s preference for the status quo and his own comfort to keep up with the rest of the league. If you needed any more proof that Jones isn’t serious about building a Dallas Cowboys team that’s capable of winning a Super Bowl, his decision to essentially punt on this head coach hiring cycle should be enough.
In a vacuum, moving on from Mike McCarthy after a five-year tenure that resulted in a lot of regular-season wins but no postseason success is completely reasonable. But moving on from McCarthy only to promote Schottenheimer from offensive coordinator is, frankly, embarrassing. In the nearly two weeks since Jones and McCarthy split up, the pair unable (or, perhaps, unwilling) to come to terms on a new contract as McCarthy’s deal expired, the Cowboys engaged in some minor flirtation with the University of Colorado’s Deion Sanders (who starred for Dallas in the 1990s) and interviewed former Vikings head coach Leslie Frazier, former Jets head coach Robert Saleh, and current Eagles offensive coordinator Kellen Moore.
Jones notably did not interview Mike Vrabel (he was hired by New England before the Cowboys’ job officially became open) or either of the in-demand coordinators from Detroit, Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn (Jones missed the window to interview them by the end of wild-card weekend, and both have since landed head coaching jobs elsewhere). Jones kinda maybe had a conversation with Pete Carroll before settling on Schottenheimer, but that feels like it might have been a play on Carroll’s part to get the Raiders to finalize their deal to make him the head coach in Las Vegas.
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Also absent from the interview list is Bill Belichick, who, if the Cowboys were going to be even a little bit interested in the prospect of hiring Carroll, should have been at least in consideration—even as Belichick is busy recruiting high school prospects to the University of North Carolina. Jones, knowing McCarthy was on an expiring contract and Belichick was a free agent, had the entire 2024 season to gauge Belichick’s potential interest in the Cowboys job but seemingly did not.
But even if the Cowboys had gotten this whole search going a little earlier, the reality is probably that they were never in contention for a top head coach, because the Cowboys, for all of Jones’s bluster, are not a top-tier destination for the best free agent players or coaches, and they haven’t been for a while. Jones and his son Stephen, who runs the front office, are notoriously cheap when it comes to free agency—they spent just $18.85 million to bring in outside players in 2024, according to Spotrac, and cried poor when asked about why they weren’t in on the Derrick Henry sweepstakes last offseason. Not to mention they habitually botch contract negotiations with their homegrown stars. Jones seems to fervently believe it’s an honor to play for America’s Team and that Cowboys players like Dak Prescott or CeeDee Lamb should bend the knee and take a below-market-value contract to stay there. (It’s worth noting that Prescott and Lamb both held their positions long enough that they forced Jones to pay out record-setting deals. The QB-WR duo is set to account for 45.6 percent of the Cowboys’ cap in 2025, which should make it exceedingly difficult for the Cowboys to spend money elsewhere. For his sake, hopefully Micah Parsons has been paying attention.) If Jones thought the top candidates of his hiring cycle were going to be banging down his door for a chance to work for him at The Star, which is as much a tourist attraction these days as it is a football facility, he was, once again, badly mistaken.
So, the Cowboys landed on Schottenheimer, an NFL nepo baby with a perfectly adequate résumé as an offensive coordinator. He’s worked under Carroll in Seattle, Eric Mangini and Rex Ryan with the Jets, and Jeff Fisher for three forgettable years in St. Louis. Of the offenses for which he called plays, only the 2019 Seahawks finished in the top 10 in total yards, while that group and three others finished in the top 10 for scoring. The 2023 Cowboys were statistically the best offense he’s coordinated, but McCarthy was the primary play caller. His familiarity with Prescott and the continuity he offers the quarterback are about the only obvious positives here if the Cowboys want to sell this move to an understandably skeptical fan base. But a more likely reason that Schottenheimer got this job was because Jones had to stay in the building to find someone who would say yes. Schottenheimer has probably dreamed for years of becoming a head coach like his father, Marty, was, and, well, it’s not like any other teams were lining up to interview him. At the very least, he’s going to be leading a team that has a franchise quarterback and a true WR1 to work with, which is a plus but probably doesn’t outweigh the, um, challenges that will come with working for Jones.
Jones wasn’t looking for a schematic innovator or defensive mastermind or a Leader of Men™. He was looking for someone who would first say yes to the job, and then keep saying yes to Jones for the next three or four years. It’s been nearly 20 years, since the end of the Bill Parcells era, since the Cowboys had a head coach who wasn’t widely considered to be someone who would be happy to sit in Jones’s shadow and go along with his wishes. Surely Schottenheimer knows going in that it’ll be Jones who is the face of the franchise, and serves as final decision-maker on the draft, free agency, and the 53-man roster. Schottenheimer will hold his news conferences each week, but it’ll be Jones’s postgame sound bites and midweek radio appearances that garner the headlines.
The Cowboys exit this head coaching cycle no closer to NFC relevancy than they were at the end of the regular season, when they dropped back-to-back games to division rivals Philadelphia and Washington, who, coincidentally, are playing each other in the NFC championship game on Sunday. If Schottenheimer is able to lead the Cowboys back to contention in the NFC East in the next few years (which isn’t inconceivable, if Prescott, Lamb, and Parsons all make it through a season healthy) and get over the playoff hump that vexed McCarthy and Jason Garrett before him, it will be in spite of Jones, not because of some savvy ownership decisions.
There’s no guarantee that any of the other head coaching hires will work out. Will Liam Coen, who Littlefingered his way into the Jacksonville job and ghosted the Bucs on his way out, be better at designing an offense around Trevor Lawrence than Doug Pederson was? Will Carroll provide a long-overdue culture change and provide some respectability to a Raiders franchise that still has a major hole at quarterback? Will Ben Johnson be validated in his decision to wait it out through several hiring cycles before finally taking the Bears job this year? Who knows? This time last year, none of us thought Dan Quinn would be the best hire of 2024.
It’s too soon to judge who long-term true winners and losers of this hiring cycle will be.
But part of this whole thing, if you’re a franchise that was bad enough that you needed a new head coach in the first place, is to simply act like you’re trying to improve your team’s fortunes. You must do something that will inspire a fan base. Jones has failed miserably at that. But he found someone to say yes, and that’s probably all that matters to him.
This article originally misstated the number of years Mike McCarthy was the Cowboys head coach. It was five years, not four.
