Once again, Jerry Jones is tasked with the decision of hiring a football coach. History suggests that doesn’t bode well for the Cowboys.
The Jerry Jones era of the Dallas Cowboys started with a bang.
After a 1-15 disaster in 1989 in Jones’ first year as the owner and de facto general manager, the Cowboys added Emmitt Smith to a young offensive core that already featured Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin. The rest was history.
The Cowboys improved to 7-9 the following season, then made the playoffs at 11-5 in 1991. Over the next four seasons, the Cowboys won three Super Bowls, and “America’s Team” was back.
The team’s roster and culture was built under the watch of Hall of Fame head coach Jimmy Johnson, who claimed two of those Super Bowl titles before his and Jones’ relationship became untenable. In 1995, Barry Switzer stepped in to lead the Cowboys to a third Super Bowl in four years.
Jones has been chasing that legacy ever since. In the 29 seasons since their 1995 title, the Cowboys have failed — sometimes spectacularly — to replicate that success. Reclaiming the magic of the Johnson era remains elusive nearly three decades later despite Jones’ frequently misguided efforts to do so.
Jones has made several swings since Switzer — some bigger than others — to find the right coach to return the Cowboys to their self-presumed rightful place in the upper echelon of the NFL. While some have produced better results than others, none of have been anywhere close to a home run.
The Cowboys have yet to return to the NFC championship game, much less play in or win a Super Bowl, since the 1995 season. Six Cowboys coaches since Switzer resigned in 1998 have produced a grand total of four playoff wins — three fewer than Johnson’s teams won in his four seasons as head coach.
Let’s take a look back at the varying degrees of success — or lack thereof — of the last six coaches of the Dallas Cowboys as Jones embarks on another head coaching search.
Chan Gailey
1998-99; 18-14 in regular season; 0-2 in playoffs
A disciple of Dan Reeves during the early John Elway-era Broncos, Gailey replaced Switzer in 1998 after two seasons as the offensive coordinator for the Steelers. He took over a name-brand performance machine whose odometer was ready to roll over.
Smith and Irvin were on the downswing, but they remained 1,000-plus yard producers. But Aikman’s Pro Bowl days were behind him, and Gailey was tasked with overseeing one of the NFL’s glory rosters in its decline. Not an enviable position.
The Cowboys went 10-6 in his first season and 8-8 in his second and lost in the wild-card round of each postseason, both times in blowout fashion. Gailey was criticized for forcing his system onto his offense rather than adapting to a roster featuring Hall of Fame talent. Jones fired him after two losses in two playoff games. The standard was higher then.
Dave Campo
2000-02; 15-33 in regular season; 0 playoff appearances
This was the darkest era of the post-Jimmy Johnson Cowboys.
Rather than look elsewhere after firing Gailey, Jones promoted Campo to head coach after his 12 seasons on staff, four of them as Dallas’ defensive coordinator. He’d been with Jones in Dallas since the beginning in 1989, and maybe he could rekindle some of that Super Bowl magic.
He could not. Campo’s first season was Aikman’s last. Irvin was already gone, having retired in 1999. It produced a 5-11 record, the Cowboys’ worst since that 1-15 campaign in 1989. Campo’s subsequent two seasons produced identical 5-11 records that buried the Cowboys at the bottom of the NFC East.
By the end of the 2002 season, Jones had seen enough as his reputation had fully morphed into that of a detriment to the Cowboys’ success. He fired Campo as a potential home run hire was in the works.
Bill Parcells
2003-06; 34-30 in regular season; 0-2 in playoffs
Bill Parcells was rumored as the Cowboys’ coach-in-waiting as Campo’s demise became clear. Jones made good on those rumors by closing the deal with Parcells three months after Campo’s dismissal.
This was to be the home run hire. The two-time Super Bowl champion coach of the Giants with an established Hall of Fame résumé, Parcells was finally the man to lead the Cowboys into a new era of winning following a three-year break from coaching in the NFL. Or he was supposed to be, at least.
Early returns were promising. Parcells turned a 5-11 team into a 10-6 squad in his first season. The Cowboys made the playoffs with Quincy Carter (17 TDs, 21 INTs) as their quarterback. Imagine what Parcells could do with a good quarterback. It’s a proposition that never quite materialized.
Dallas missed the playoffs the next two seasons with aging veterans Vinny Testaverde and Drew Bledsoe under center. Parcells replaced Bledsoe with undrafted Tony Romo midseason in 2006, a decision that helped propel the Cowboys to a 10-6 record and the playoffs.
But Romo botched the hold on a 19-yard, go-ahead field goal against the Seahawks, and the Cowboys suffered one of the most crushing playoff losses in team history. And Parcells had seen enough. He retired in the offseason, citing mental exhaustion.
“Physically, I could still do it,” Parcells told ESPN. “But, mentally, this is a 12-month-a-year job and I’ve been doing it since 1964. It was time to stop. I just have to let go.”
And thus swam away Jones’ white whale.
Wade Phillips
2007-10; 34-22 in regular season; 1-2 in playoffs
In Phillips, Jones hired another established NFL veteran to replace Parcells, though one with a considerably lesser pedigree. But it was a decision that came with a clear edict: win now. The Cowboys were in no place to develop a young coach, and Jones was in no mood to do so.
While Parcells’ exit was disappointing, his tenure left behind something the Cowboys hadn’t experienced in years — hope at quarterback. Despite his postseason snafu, Romo showed unexpected promise in 2006 as the Cowboys’ first Pro Bowl quarterback since Aikman in 1996.
Enter Phillips — a two-time NFL head coach (Broncos, Bills) and most recently the respected defensive coordinator of the Chargers — and there was reason for hope on both sides of the ball. It was bolstered by considerable talent featuring All-Pros Terrell Owens, Jason Witten and DeMarcus Ware. Parcells did not leave the cupboard bare.
Phillips’ first season was a success, producing a 13-3 record, NFC East title and first-round bye in the playoffs. But then came the Cowboys’ bugaboo. They lost at home to the division-rival Giants in the divisional round, and their playoff victory drought extended to an 11th season.
Phillips would break the drought. The Cowboys made the postseason again with an 11-5 record in 2009. There, Romo and the Cowboys defeated Donovan McNabb’s Eagles for the franchise’s first playoff win since the 1996 season.
But eight games later, Phillips was out of a job. The Cowboys got off to a 1-7 start in 2010 and lost Romo to a collarbone injury in Week 6. For the first time in his tenure, Jones fired a coach in midseason.
“I don’t want any of it,” Jones said after a 45-7 loss to the Packers in Week 8. “I don’t want any of it for our team and for our fans. I’m not stomaching this.”
A day later, Phillips was fired, a decision that ushered in the most stable coaching tenure of the Jones era.
Jason Garrett
2010-19; 85-67 in regular season; 2-5 in playoffs
Jones promoted Garrett from offensive coordinator to replace Phillips midseason. Dallas finished 5-3 under Garrett, and he earned the job full-time. A backup quarterback to Aikman who won two Super Bowls as a player, Garrett was a long-time favorite of Jones’ who’d been on staff since 2007.
“He’s truly one of our own,” Jones said when naming Garrett as head coach in 2011.
The Cowboys missed the playoffs with 8-8 finishes in each of Garrett’s first three full seasons, but his job remained safe. He clearly had a longer leash than his predecessors.
In 2014, Garrett produced his first winning season as head coach with a 12-4 campaign that won the NFC East and secured a wild-card berth. The Cowboys then beat the Lions in the wild-card round before falling to Aaron Rodgers’ Packers in the divisional round. That marked the end of the Romo era in earnest.
Following a 4-12 2015 campaign, the Cowboys earned the No. 1 seed in the NFC in 2016 with rookie Dak Prescott at quarterback. But the hallmark trend of the post-Switzer Cowboys continued. The Cowboys did not make it past the divisional round, losing at home to the Packers after a 13-3 season.
The Cowboys made the playoffs once more under Garrett in 2018, where they won in the wild-card round and lost yet again in the divisional round, this time to Jared Goff’s Rams. After an 8-8 2019 season, Jones’ patience with Garrett had finally worn thin. The Cowboys were mostly good but never great under Garrett, and Jones opted not to renew the contract of his favorite son.
Mike McCarthy
2020-2024; 49-35 in regular season; 1-3 in playoffs
By 2020, Jones’ Cowboys had developed the reputation of a perennially underachieving franchise that falters in the postseason. So what did Jones do? He hired a coach in Mike McCarthy with a history of game mismanagement and postseason disappointment who’s shouldered some blame in Green Bay for Rodgers playing in just a single Super Bowl.
The results played out as expected. McCarthy was generally well-liked and well-respected in the Cowboys locker room, as demonstrated by Prescott and Micah Parsons expressing their displeasure with his dismissal. But the same old Cowboys were the same old Cowboys.
After a 6-10 season in 2020, McCarthy coached a talented Cowboys roster to three straight 12-5 playoff campaigns. None of them advanced past the divisional round.
The Cowboys lost in the wild-card round to the 49ers in 2021 and again to the 49ers in the divisional round in 2022 after beating the Bucs in Tom Brady’s final career game in the wild-card round. Then came last season’s disaster.
Playing as the No. 2 seed at home, the Cowboys got thumped by the seventh-seeded Packers in the wild-card round. Those Cowboys remain the only No. 2 seed to lose to a No. 7 in 10 games since the NFL expanded the playoffs to 14 teams in 2020.
As with his Packers tenure, McCarthy’s time with the Cowboys was dotted with high-profile instances of game mismanagement. But that’s not why Jones parted with McCarthy. McCarthy’s done in Dallas because he and Jones reportedly couldn’t agree to terms on the length of a contract extension. Jones may have ultimately made the right decision for the wrong reason.
But it will only be the right decision if Jones can finally hire the right man for the job. And it’s been more than 30 years since he’s managed to do so.
