| DALLASAnd so it is Brian Schottenheimer, who watched Mike McCarthy call the plays last year, who gets the pleasure of serving Jerry Jones and the Cowboys in the role of head coach. Adam Schein sums up what a lot of NFL experts/followers are thinking: @AdamScheinHow the hell do you choose Schotty over Mike McCarthy? Or Deion? You can wrap your brain around Kellen Moore! This… I mean come on. It’s over. It’s been over but now it’s all over. The Athletic story has some resumé positives for Schotty: The Dallas Cowboys have hired Brian Schottenheimer as their next head coach, the team announced Friday, 11 days after parting ways with Mike McCarthy. Dallas’ search for a defensive coordinator, meanwhile, remains ongoing, but former Chicago Bears head coach Matt Eberflus — who served as a linebackers coach for the Cowboys from 2011 to 2017 — is a candidate for the job, a team source said Friday. Regarding the head-coaching search process, Dallas interviewed several candidates, including Philadelphia Eagles offensive coordinator Kellen Moore, former Minnesota Vikings coach Leslie Frazier and former New York Jets coach Robert Saleh, but ultimately hired within the organization. Schottenheimer has been with Dallas for the last three seasons. He has spent 14 years as an NFL offensive coordinator, working for the Jets, St. Louis Rams, Seattle Seahawks and Cowboys. Initially brought on by Dallas as a coaching analyst in 2022, Schottenheimer was promoted to offensive coordinator in 2023 following the departure of Moore. While McCarthy retained play-calling duties, Schottenheimer helped revitalize the Cowboys offense. In his first year on the job, Dallas led the league with 509 points scored — second-most for a single season in franchise history behind their 2021 season — while finishing fifth in the league in total yards gained. It was the fifth time since 2000 that a Cowboys offense finished top-five in both scoring and yards and the sixth time in franchise history Dallas led the league in scoring. That season saw Dak Prescott lead the league in passing touchdowns (36) and finish second in MVP voting, while CeeDee Lamb led the league in receptions (135). The Cowboys collectively struggled in 2024, with their offense taking a step back behind a lack of personnel. Dallas lost its top rusher from the previous season, Tony Pollard, to free agency and was unable to replace his impact effectively. The Cowboys were also without wideout Brandin Cooks (knee injury) for a considerable chunk of the season, reducing key receiver depth behind Lamb. Prescott was eventually ruled out for the season with a hamstring injury. But despite the injuries across the team, Dallas still finished 17th in total yards gained and 21st in scoring in the league. Before coming to Dallas, Schottenheimer, who has 25 years of NFL coaching experience, was a quarterbacks coach and passing game coordinator for the 2021 Jacksonville Jaguars, tasked to help rookie Trevor Lawrence while working under Urban Meyer. His last offensive coordinator role before Dallas came with the Seattle Seahawks. The team finished top-10 in scoring each of the three seasons he was in place. In 2018, the Seahawks led the league in rushing with 2,560 yards, third-most for a single season in franchise history. Schottenheimer also was the offensive coordinator behind the “Let Russ Cook” era in Seattle. In 2020, Wilson threw a career-high 40 touchdowns on a career-high 68.8 completion percentage en route to a 12-4 season — the Seahawks’ best season since the Legion of Boom era — while scoring a franchise-record 459 points on the year. He also served as an offensive coordinator under Jeff Fisher with the St. Louis Rams and worked under Rex Ryan as an offensive coordinator with the New York Jets. In New York, Schottenheimer helped Chad Pennington secure Comeback Player of the Year honors in 2006 and led Mark Sanchez and the Jets offense to their most recent playoff berth during the 2010 season. Schottenheimer was a quarterbacks coach in Indianapolis during the later tenure of Andrew Luck’s career; he also worked with a young Drew Brees as quarterbacks coach of the San Diego Chargers. Brian is the son of late NFL coach Marty Schottenheimer, who served as the head coach in Cleveland, Washington, San Diego and Kansas City. Cowboys hire from withinMost would have assumed that if the Cowboys moved on from McCarthy, then a list of possible replacements would include Ben Johnson, Aaron Glenn, Kliff Kingsbury and Joe Brady. Dallas didn’t interview any of them. Instead, the Cowboys went with a surprising hire. While Schottenheimer is respected in the building and has 25 years of NFL coaching experience, was this the best possible hire or the one that kept things most comfortable for Jerry Jones? It seems like the latter. Schottenheimer was Dallas’ offensive coordinator the previous two seasons but he did not call plays. Now, he will likely do that while also handling everything that comes with being a head coach. Schottenheimer’s father was an outstanding NFL head coach for 21 seasons. Jones likely sees similarities. But this is a stunning result that no one was predicting even a week ago. — Jon Machota, Cowboys beat writer What lies ahead for SchottenheimerSchottenheimer needs to figure out how to help the Cowboys rebound from a losing season, and most importantly, put together a deep playoff run in January. That begins with the coaching staff he puts in place, which is going to be crucial. Schottenheimer has never been a head coach in the NFL and has had middling results as a coordinator. His father was a good NFL head coach but this job isn’t genetic. Schottenheimer needs to surround himself with experience, especially on the defensive side, where he has less expertise. Offensively, he needs to ensure the staff he puts together is in sync with whatever philosophy Schottenheimer wants to execute. Figuring out who calls the plays on offense, Schottenheimer himself or a coordinator, will also be a big step. Schottenheimer has been in the building for the past three years, including serving as the offensive coordinator under McCarthy for the last two years. That includes 2023, in which the offense thrived and Prescott finished as the MVP runner-up. Schottenheimer has seen up close what it takes to get the best out of Prescott and getting that consistently, especially in games with high stakes, will be the biggest key to success. — Saad Yousuf, Cowboys beat writer Ed Werder with another football justification for hiring Schottenheimer (and apparently not hiring the youthful Moore): @WerderEdNFLThe Cowboys decided to promote OC Brian Schottenheimer over waiting for former OC Kellen Moore – coaching NFC Championship Game with Eagles Sunday – at least partly because they viewed his personality as more capable of commanding the room in terms of demanding accountability and establishing leadership. Continuity of offensive system and positive history with Dak Prescott other factors. Michael David Smith of ProFootballTalk.com: For most teams, the length of a head coach’s contract isn’t all that important: Successful coaches routinely get extensions before their contracts are up. Unsuccessful coaches routinely get fired before their contracts are up. Most coaches never complete a full contract. The Cowboys are different: Their last head coach, Mike McCarthy, coached the entire length of his contract. The coach before McCarthy, Jason Garrett, also coached the entire length of his contract. Garrett initially became the Cowboys’ coach when he was promoted from offensive coordinator when Wade Phillips was fired mid-season. In Dallas, Jerry Jones has established the precedent that coaches don’t leave because they’re fired or resign. They stay until their contract is up. So it’s newsworthy that new Cowboys head coach Brian Schottenheimer got a four-year contract, according to Nick Harris of the Star-Telegram. That means he’s under contract through the 2028 season, which is also the last year that quarterback Dak Prescott and wide receiver CeeDee Lamb are under contract. It’s not a guarantee that Schottenheimer’s job is safe for four years regardless of the results, but it’s a strong indication that Jones plans to have a team run by Schottenheimer, building the offense around Prescott, for the next four seasons. Four seasons during which Cowboys fans hope they can figure out a way to do something they haven’t done in three decades, and advance past the divisional round of the playoffs. The DB finds it interesting, because was Schottenheimer, never this close to a head job before, really in a position not to take a three-year offer? And talks between Jones and Mike McCarthy broke down, we have been told, over the length of the contract. Presumably therefore, Jones wouldn’t offer McCarthy the four years he was willing to commit to Schottenheimer. Some other reaction: Matt Mosley: @mattmosleyThis may be the most unsatisfying coaching hire to the fan base in Cowboys history. Chan Gailey was at least recognized as a top offensive mind before being hired. We knew Dave Campo because of the Super Bowls. Brian Schottenheimer just seems like a fallback option. It’s wild. From Ernie The Cowboys Fan: @es3_09Wade Phillips ➡️ Jason Garrett Mike McCarthy ➡️ Brian Schottenheimer Quick, easy, CHEAP, and the Jones’ retain control just the way they like it. This team doesn’t want to win. It’s about attention. It’s about egos. Cowboys fans are exhausted with this clown show. Cowboys Due Dilligence: @StevieJPTXHiring Brian Schottenheimer as head coach without even trying to talk to Ben Johnson, Aaron Glenn or other top candidates is 1000% the same thing as not calling Derrick Henry and just signing Zeke. Same. Exact. Thing. Connor Orr of SI.com with as close to a positive take as we could find to balance things. Hint, it’s not very positive: It’s time to wake up. It’s time to stop buying the $300 authentic jerseys and the $170 Starter jackets. It’s time to stop flying to Oxnard—although many of you have already made that decision—and it’s time to stop fawning over this sun-blinded space station plopped in the middle of some vacant farmland and surrounded by strip mall vacuum cleaners calibrated to suck the money out of your pockets. It’s time to stop the tours. It’s time to stop dropping triple digits just to park. It’s time to stop the sycophancy, believing that the billionaires atop this football pyramid scheme are about a single thing other than improving the bottom line. In hiring Brian Schottenheimer, the Dallas Cowboys aren’t even trying to sell hope like other self-respecting NFL franchises. The Jones family had an affinity for Dan Quinn, allowed him to walk, and watched as Quinn roared to the NFC championship game with the Washington Commanders. They played chicken with Mike McCarthy at the bargaining table and lost him, too, only to feign interest in Deion Sanders for publicity’s sake and hire McCarthy’s offensive coordinator who was there all along. With absolutely no risk of losing Schottenheimer to another head coaching job, the Jones family didn’t even bother to wait out conference championship weekend, where any of the eight coordinators—Bobby Babich, Joe Brady, Vic Fangio, Kellen Moore, Steve Spagnuolo, Matt Nagy, Kliff Kingsbury or Joe Whitt Jr.—would have represented some encouraging twist in the search process. Or at least a sign that someone was turning the lights on at the Star—the Cowboys’ practice facility—every once and a while. Let me be very clear by saying this: I don’t have a problem with Schottenheimer the person, and I am willing to have my mind changed on him as a head coach devoid of this situation in particular. The success of a head coach is conditional on so many outside factors and is impossible to predict at the outset. Schottenheimer, too, is one of the rare people in this business that you’ll find who is almost universally well-liked. Perhaps that sentiment was expressed by the players. Jones also came to power in the NFL at a time when Schottenheimer’s father, Marty, a former All-Star player in the pre-merger era who twice won coach of the year and has one of the largest and most influential coaching trees in modern NFL history, was routinely posting winning seasons. But if Jones even had the slightest inkling of Schottenehimer being a quality head coach, why did he not promote him to the job during this lost and injury-riddled 2024 season knowing full well that he would even make a reasonable effort to keep McCarthy in the first place? If this was all part of some 3D chess maneuver, why does it look more like the end of Monopoly, where someone is squeezing tight some last remaining dollar bills before getting stomped out by the owners of Park Place? That’s where the focus should be. That’s where you should train your eyes. That’s what you should be mad about. This is why you should check out until these owners check back in. It’s not about the result. It’s about the process by which we arrive at one confounding decision after another. Wait to pay the players until the market spikes. Overpay for those players to convince yourself you can’t afford helpful free agents. And, now, dismiss the head coach and hire his offensive coordinator when, at any point over the past two seasons, that offensive coordinator could have been your head coach and had a trial run already. Don’t “old takes expose” me when the Cowboys are 3–1 next season and everything appears fine because the team possesses three of the best players on the planet. I covered the 2010 New York Jets, a team that featured Schottenheimer as an offensive coordinator at a point when Schottenheimer had legitimate head coaching prospects. The league is cyclical and I don’t doubt his ability to field a winning football team, though Schottenheimer has fielded just four of 14 seasons as an offensive coordinator with a top-10 finish in points scored (and only two top-10 finishes in total yards, and only one top-10 finish in net passing yards per attempt). You should be mad because Dallas has “interviewed” six—six—candidates for what the Jones family bills as the largest and most (self) important sports franchise in the world. Other teams nearly hit 20 candidates. The Cowboys did not even surface in the Ben Johnson conversation. They did not interview Brian Flores, who fell out of favor in Miami because he won too many games with a roster built to tank. They did not interview Liam Coen, the only offensive coordinator since 2000 to score more than 28 points per game, and six or more yards per play and a 65% rate in the red zone or better and a 50% or better third down conversion percentage. They did not interview Aaron Glenn, a former Cowboy from Humble, Texas. They did not interview Todd Monken, whose artful play-calling helped turn Lamar Jackson into a perennial MVP candidate. They did not interview Kingsbury, a Texas native responsible for the best quarterback coaching job of the season. They essentially had Bill Belichick fawning over them on television a year ago and watched as he took a job at the University of North Carolina. On the team’s website, the Sanders publicity stunt got the Colorado head coach listed as an official candidate. Hence, the air quotes around the word interview. This search was a farce. To boot, the Jones empire is forcing Schottenheimer to play from behind, which is a large part of where my animus comes from. The public sentiment surrounding this hire is abhorrent. It’s beyond alarm. His leash will be shorter than a lepton. If his clock management isn’t perfect, if his offense lags, you’ll feel ready to riot. Don’t fall for the okie doke, though. If it doesn’t look right, if you’re down double digits in the fourth quarter, if this offense is running into a brick wall, don’t boo toward the sideline. Don’t blame Schottenheimer. Turn around and find your nearest owner’s box. Jerry Jones, the league’s great showman, the orchestrator of all media attention, was so excited about this hire that he allowed the news to drop at 10 p.m. ET on a Friday night, when most of the people who would care are either out enjoying their night or asleep on the couch. But like we said, it’s time to wake up. If there was any last Cowboys fan among you standing who believed this ownership group was interested in fielding the best team possible, that owner just told you exactly what he thought of you. Now, it’s time to return the favor. The DB doesn’t believe that a search of 20 candidates is necessary. The Bears and Jets talked to all those candidates and still hired guys that would have been on their list if there was a limit of five. It looks like Matt Eberflus is going to be the DC (and interim head coach when Schottenheimer gets fired in 2026), per Jeremy Fowler of ESPN.com: @JFowlerESPNSources consider former #Bears head coach Matt Eberflus a prime candidate for the #Cowboys defensive coordinator job under new coach Brian Schottenheimer, per sources. Eberflus was a Cowboys assistant from 2011-17. |
| JACKSONVILLEAlbert Breer of SI.com with good insight on the messy process that made Liam Coen the Jaguars head coach. Basically, Coen had to look deceitful so that the Jaguars could “satisfy” the letter of the Rooney Rule. That Liam Coen will be the next head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars wouldn’t have surprised anyone at the beginning of this week. Things trended that way over the NFL’s divisional round weekend—after his first interview on Jan. 15—with a second interview initially set for Wednesday, Jan. 22. But how the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ offensive coordinator and the Jaguars got here took a borderline unprecedented turn of events. On Thursday night in Jacksonville, the two sides reached a verbal agreement to make Coen the Jaguars’ new head coach. A long-form contract still needs to be executed, but, at this point, isn’t much more than a formality, and its completion will close the book on one of the wilder coaching carousel stories in recent memory. This one began before Coen did his first interview over video conference with the Jaguars. Knowing it was coming and believing that Coen had a real shot at the job, Buccaneers GM Jason Licht approached his offensive coordinator to ask exactly what it would take for Coen to stay in Tampa. Coen came back with a salary request that would make him the highest-paid coordinator in NFL history, and by a healthy margin. Licht took the proposal back to the Glazer family, who own the Buccaneers, and got it approved. He then went to Coen, telling him he had his number, that the team loved him, and badly wanted him to stay, but didn’t want to negotiate anymore. Coen then met with the Glazers, who encouraged him to take the first interview with the Jaguars to, at the very least, get the experience of having done one. So Coen did the interview, and he did well enough to be in a group of three finalists invited to Jacksonville to do second interviews with the team in-person—joining Las Vegas Raiders defensive coordinator Patrick Graham and ex-New York Jets coach Robert Saleh. The complication, for Coen, was his offer from the Buccaneers was contingent on him not taking the second interview. Coen asked for time to think it over, then came back and asked for more money. The Buccaneers responded by saying that the offer was the offer, and they needed an answer by Monday. He later asked to have until Tuesday. Then, on Tuesday evening, he told the Bucs he’d have an answer Wednesday morning, with his second interview with the Jags looming. So on Wednesday morning, Coen verbally accepted the Buccaneers’ three-year deal to make him the highest-paid coordinator in NFL history. He talked to ownership, called head coach Todd Bowles and a few players, and sent a group text to the staff to give everyone the news. He’d told some folks that he knew the move to stay would prove correct in the long run. It wasn’t long after that the news of the Jaguars firing GM Trent Baalke surfaced, which changed everything about Jacksonville’s pursuit of Coen. On Wednesday afternoon, with Coen expected to be at 1 Buccaneer Place to sign his deal, efforts by team brass to get ahold of Coen failed. Around 5 p.m., Coen called back to ask Licht if it was O.K. if he came in Thursday morning to sign the contract—rather than doing it that night—and Licht told him that was fine. Around 10 a.m. Thursday, the Buccaneers still hadn’t heard from Coen, and assistant GM Mike Greenberg had to reach out to him on a contract for another offensive coach that was being finalized. That call went unanswered, too, as did additional attempts by Licht and Bowles. Finally, at 11 a.m., Coen’s agent got back to the Bucs and informed them that his client was tending to a personal matter. Tampa waited a few hours, and then Licht, Bowles and other staffers tried, again, to get ahold of Coen. During the 5 p.m. hour, Coen called Bowles and told him he was still dealing with his personal matter. He also told him that things had materially changed in Jacksonville, and that he was going to travel there to explore the opening. Within an hour of that phone call, a Bucs staffer got tipped off by someone in the Jaguars’ facility that Coen was already in the building. The Jaguars had emphasized to Coen’s camp how important it was that the visit stay under wraps, which could explain why the coordinator kept his plans from the Buccaneers. In the wake of firing Baalke, and in addition to a healthy financial offer, the Jags offered Coen a chance to effectively pick his general manager—an opportunity exceedingly rare for a first-time head coach. In fact, one colleague told Coen that Kyle Shanahan’s hire in San Francisco was the only such offer for a first-timer he could remember like the one Coen had in front of him. The secrecy over the visit did serve two theoretical purposes. One, obviously, it would preserve the Tampa offer for Coen, which, again, was contingent on the OC not visiting Jacksonville. Two, it allowed the Jaguars to satisfy the Rooney Rule. Going into Thursday, the Jags only had one minority candidate in for an in-person interview—Saleh’s first was in-person. They needed two to comply, so Graham was slated to come Thursday for the other. But the Jags didn’t want word of their plans getting out, which could cause Graham to cancel. On Thursday morning, with Graham in, the Jaguars called Saleh to cancel his scheduled second interview on Friday morning. So the Jags and Coen tip-toed around everyone Thursday, with the team trying to jump through the NFL’s prescribed hiring hoops so it could make its hire, and the coach trying to make it to the finish line to capture a unique opportunity, while not losing a lucrative offer to stay where he was. In the end, the Jags and Coen got to the conclusion they were looking for. As messy as it might have been. |
