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DCC 4Life
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- Apr 10, 2013
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By Patrik Walker
The danger with low-hanging fruit? It's the most likely to be infested with insects.
Such is the case when it comes time to assess whatever ails the Dallas Cowboys at any given moment though, because most won't peel back anymore than one layer of the onion before they start crying. Take head coach Jason Garrett for example, easily one of the more vilified individuals in the NFL on a perennial basis. When things are going poorly for the Cowboys at any given point in time, nearly 100% of the blame is heaped upon Garrett -- from a coaching standpoint. In those moments when things go exceedingly well, however, suddenly it's everyone else who's due the credit. A microcosm of this truth is the 2018 season itself, one that's seen the Cowboys consistently field one of the worst offenses in the league while also boasting one of the best defenses around.
It's Garrett who gets blamed for the former while defensive coordinator Rod Marinelli and passing game coordinator Kris Richard are showered with praise for the latter, but that's disingenuous when you consider Garrett is the head coach of both the offense and the defense. That being the case, if Marinelli and Richard are supposedly the sole reason(s) for defensive success, then shouldn't Scott Linehan be the sole person to blame for the fact the Cowboys averaged just 21.2 points per game in this year's regular season (22nd) -- with that number dipping below 20 ppg on more than one occasion -- despite having the league's leading rusher, a 1,000-yard receiver and the former NFL Rookie of the Year at quarterback?
That is the (il)logic, of course.
I haven't given you my opinion of Garrett just yet and some of you are already labeling this as a truther-piece in his favor, because you're being described above. There's an inherent irony there, you should (but won't) explore, but you're also about to find out what I truly think of him and the coaching staff as a whole -- with the lazy narratives now out of the way.
Garrett makes mistakes, yes, and sometimes they're brutal.
The biggest one thus far has been to keep the aforementioned Linehan on staff, despite reports of the team nearly firing him on two separate occasions in 2018 -- once in January and at another point during the bye week when the team was 3-4. EVP Stephen Jones disputed the claims, but there's merit in them when you assess the scheme issues that cost the Cowboys a playoff berth in 2017 and just how abysmal the offense was from that point to the midway mark of this season. It's why one anonymous player on the team told Albert Breer of SI.com in October, noting Linehan "better tighten up" going forward, and veteran wide receiver labeled a play that resulted in an interception against the Houston Texans as the "worst play call you would make on that coverage".
From Dez Bryant's questions surrounding the scheme to Hurns' declaration to Amari Cooper telling quarterback Dak Prescott he didn't want to run the called in route against the Eagles in Week 14 -- due to Philadelphia having sat on such routes all game -- it's impossible to see this trend and bird box your way past Linehan to land solely on Garrett in that offensive blame game.
Is the longtime head coach absolved from all accountability there, though?
Not in the least, because you ultimately are who you choose to employ, and the loyalty that flows from Garrett to Linehan has handcuffed the Cowboys more often than not in recent history. The latter being responsible for granting the former his first-ever coaching job with the Miami Dolphins in 2005, there's an obvious affinity that exists between the two -- for better or for worse. It's a dynamic that could very well keep Dallas out of the Super Bowl LIII in February, if star players don't continue to make big plays despite their own offensive coordinator and not because of him. There can be no argument regarding the football IQ of Linehan, a brilliant mind and a proven coordinator several times over in the NFL, but the debate regarding his inability and/or unwillingness to adapt on a consistent basis is a sound one.
He's still calling plays in 2018 as if it were somehow still 2016, or even the front end of 2017, and barring the occasional well-timed and ovation-worthy call -- it's mostly an uber-conservative cauldron of predictability. It's cost the Cowboys games at times, and a veto from Garrett in certain situational instances would have surely been welcome, but never arrived to save the day. If he chooses to keep Linehan on staff in 2019, a possible but still far-from-guaranteed decision, Garrett will undoubtedly have to put a bigger fingerprint on the play-calling in some capacity. He already has begun to do so, if you haven't noticed, with the Cowboys' gameplan looking a bit different in some aspects as of late -- including wrinkles not seen all year.
Plus, Jones and Garrett have already admitted as much, adding that much more credence to the reality of a looming extension. He hasn't (yet) re-assumed play-calling duties though, but stay tuned to what happens offensively throughout the playoffs. If things go awry on that side of the ball and the ultimatum from Jones is positioned as "extension or your OC", you better believe Garrett will choose his own job security.
As far as the other errors accountable to Garrett, none are nearly as egregious as the Linehan dynamic, despite what your favorite national sports network has fed you. Anyone expecting him to be perfect only does so because they need to retain a platform to morph even his slightest mistakes into billboard material when, in actuality, they're really not that big of a deal and routinely found in the habits of top coaches around the league. One example would be seeing Garrett raked over the coals going into the bye week with a 3-4 record, despite having not lost two consecutive games up to that point as the team worked to get things turned around.
Sean McVay and the Los Angeles Rams, whom the Cowboys will face in the Divisional Round, lost two consecutive games in December and coughed up the No. 1 seed to the New Orleans Saints -- to little criticism.
"The Rams had an eight-game win streak to start the season, though! That's why!" - You
That's fair, but McVay has never registered an 11-game win streak as a head coach. Garrett has, and he did it with two rookies leading the way in 2016 en route to Head Coach of the Year honors. This isn't to take away from the brilliance that is McVay, but instead to adjust perspective on what the Cowboys have in Garrett, even if some believe he's growing a bit long in the tooth. To that point, changing simply for the sake of change is an absurd reason to do anything in business (or life), which is why those who set their morning alarm to wake up and lobby for Garrett to be fired should ready themselves for a lot more days of doing just that.
Not only is Garrett not going to be jettisoned at this point, but he'll likely land a contract extension soon -- of the five-year variety.
Currently signed through the 2019 season, the seat was justifiably hot beneath his bottom leading into this past September and the slow start didn't help his cause. Owner Jerry Jones never showed a crack in his armor of support for Garrett, even when there likely was one or two floating around that "I don't have time to have a bad time" brain of his. The Hall of Fame owner knows he isn't immortal and the recent death of Texans' owner Bob McNair -- a close friend of Jones -- truly served as a reminder of The Clock hovering above him. Should the wheels had fully come off in 2018, odds of Garrett being met with a pink slip would've been quite high. At worst (for him), he might've been fired this offseason and at best, Jones would've allowed him to coach out the final year of his deal.
With the troops rallied in a fashion a rare few other coaches could muster, Garrett has proven he deserves to hang around and you should expect that to be the case. With a 3-5 record following the humiliating Week 9 loss to the Tennessee Titans -- the only home loss suffered all season -- and preparing to face the surging Eagles in unforgiving Eastern Pennsylvania, it would've taken absolutely nothing for the Cowboys to wave the white flag on 2018. They were underdogs in that game and staring at the most brutal stretch of schedule in the NFL, after all, with only an infinitesimal chance of making the playoffs. It wouldn't be the first time a team has given up on their coach, as evidenced recently when the Eagles did so just ahead of Chip Kelly being fired, but something different happened in the Cowboys' locker room.
Something...special.
With their backs against the wall, the house burning to the ground and the cocker spaniels all fleeing through the nearby open window, Dallas didn't take the easy way out and chase fresh air. They instead beat back to the flames and rattled off a five-game win streak, including a sweep of the Eagles and an all-impressive curb-stomp of the Saints to propel themselves to their third NFC East crown in the past three years. This could only happen if players remain bought-in on what a head coach is preaching, and few organizations can boast the type of player-coach relationship seen in Dallas. Including being named interim in 2010, this is Garrett's ninth-year (8.5 as the head coach) with the club, and he has never once lost control of his locker room in nearly a decade.
Now far removed from the longstanding 8-8 narrative, Garrett is 77-59 in the regular season and 48-32 in his last five years.
Postseason success has eluded him for several reasons, be it an ill-timed fumble, a controversial overturned catch, or the like, but he's now 2-2 following the Wild Card win over the Seattle Seahawks. It's also safe to assume his regular season record would be much better if not for the abhorrent 2015, when Jones and Co. forced the likes of Brandon Weeden, Matt Cassel and Kellen Moore onto Garrett to replace the injured Tony Romo. They went 1-11 that season without the four-time pro bowler, and it took Garrett helping to morph Dak Prescott from a fourth-round comp pick on the bubble in training camp to the franchise-saving QB who prevented 2016 from being a deja vu moment.
Well played, and if they defeat the Los Angeles Rams in this year's Divisional Round -- put Garrett in the conversation for a possible second HCOTY honor in only three years for what he will have accomplished when all the chips were down in 2018.
(Photo: Kyle Terada, USA TODAY Sports)
"He's been here too long with no Super Bowl win!" - You
In a league that puts head coaches on an egg timer, Garrett remains of the few who have bucked the trend, and here's a list of some who had more tenure through December:
Bill Belichick - 18 seasons
Marvin Lewis* - 15 seasons
Mike McCarthy* - 12 seasons
Sean Payton - 12 seasons
[*Indicates fired in 2018]
__
What's interesting here is outside of Belichick, no coach listed has more than one Super Bowl ring and Lewis leaves the Bengals with none at all. He's also defeated an all-powerful Saints team led by Payton on two separate occasions when the Cowboys were projected to get disemboweled, another forehead-raising stat. It bears mentioning that even the illustrious and incomparable Tom Landry, the only coach who held a longer tenure in Dallas than Garrett, didn't make it to his first Super Bowl until his 11th season -- losing before winning it in his 12th.
I'm sure social media would've given Landry a fair shot at righting the ship, though. I'm willing to bet all of absolutely nothing at all on it.
Extrapolating for the officiating debacle against the Green Bay Packers in the 2014 NFC Divisional Round -- along with the aforementioned fumble by running back DeMarco Murray -- it's quite feasible Garrett would've led the Cowboys to a Super Bowl ring that year. Instead, he's still hard at work trying to bring the ever-elusive sixth Lombardi to Dallas, with the league's post-mortem confession regarding the catch on Bryant now being wholly inconsequential. After all, NFL gonna NFL, and it's another variable to consider when assessing how you believe Garrett has done and is doing at the helm for the most visible and most valuable sports franchise on the planet.
The 2018 season began as terrifyingly bad as 2015, when the Cowboys entered Week 8 with a 2-5 record, but ended with the fragrance of 2016 -- a year wherein they won six of their last eight games. This one's already more special than the record-setting 13-3 from two years ago though, because it involved being shoved into an early grave and being forced to climb out with one of their wrists handcuffed to one of their ankles. The defense has been supreme and Lombardi-worthy, but Garrett has remained able to mount the troops in the face of a questionable offensive coordinator -- one he makes the mistake of holding onto longer than necessary.
If you're going to blame him for something, make sure it's that decision, and not the fact he took in a World Series game on his day off. It doesn't matter what he does on his day off, as long as he keeps the heat on when he steps in the building at work.
From being named the most likely head coach to be fired to now readying for the NFC Divisional Round, there are definitely some things Garrett could improve upon, but those are far outnumbered by everything he does well. A leader of men in the same mold as his former coach, Jimmy Johnson -- who tasked Norv Turner with coordinating and leading the dynasty offense of the early- to mid-1990s -- the Cowboys have all the pieces in place on the defensive side of the coaching equation (assuming Kris Richard stays put, as expected) and need only a reboot at offensive coordinator to fix the final piece of what truly ails the organization.
Think about it, what if Johnson had Linehan instead of Turner? What if Garrett had Turner instead of Linehan?
Johnson had a regular season record in Dallas of just 44-36 with the Cowboys before the infamous divorce. The glaring difference is of course Johnson's postseason mark of 9-4 with two Super Bowl wins, but the new iteration of the Doomsday Defense that's building in Dallas is new to Garrett as a HC -- as are some other things Johnson was blessed with in an era with no salary cap and a much less frugal front office. From the blockbuster Herschel Walker trade to signing Deion Sanders to landing Charles Haley and lots in-between, it makes you wonder if Johnson could replicate the success he had then with the 2010-2019 Cowboys.
He rightfully remains immortal in the ranks of Cowboys' coaches, but his 36-28 record -- not exactly fantastic -- with the Miami Dolphins was followed up with a 2-3 postseason record that included missing the playoffs altogether in his first season there. Meanwhile, with Johnson's roster in tow, first-time NFL head coach Barry Switzer stepped in and went 34-14 in his first three seasons as Cowboys' head coach, and had a stellar postseason record of 5-2 with a Super Bowl victory before the NFL salary cap truly took hold and began to negatively impact the Cowboys' ability to retain all of their Hall of Fame talent.
Even transitioning from Turner to Ernie Zampese didn't cause a hiccup in the legendary offense, the team going on to be the No. 2- and No. 3-ranked unit in Zampese's first two years as the offensive coordinator. Taking nothing away from Turner or Johnson, there's a legitimate question here regarding how much easier a coach's job can be when the roster is built to dominate. Garrett could've likely accomplished what Switzer did when you begin considering all the variables, but the odds Switzer could take any of Garrett's teams deep into the postseason is -- to put it plainly -- quite laughable.
Let's take a look at how the two eras of Cowboys' stack up against each other, as ranked against the rest of the league based on key categories.
__
DEFENSE:
Points allowed per game (1989-1997) - 24th, 15th, 17th, 5th*, 2nd*, 3rd, 3rd*, 3rd, 15th
Points allowed per game (2010-2018) - 31st, 16th, 24th, 26th, 15th, 31st, 5th, 13th, 3rd
__
Yardage allowed per game (1989-1997) - 20th, 10th, 17th, 1st*, 10th*, 1st, 9th*, 3rd, 2nd
Yardage allowed per game (2010-2018) - 23rd, 14th, 19th, 32nd, 19th, 17th, 14th, 8th, 7th
__
OFFENSE:
Points scored per game (1989-1997) - 28th, 26th, 7th, 2nd*, 2nd*, 2nd, 3rd*, 25th, 27th
Points scored per game (2010-2018) - 7th, 15th, 15th, 5th, 5th, 31st, 5th, 14th, 22nd
__
Yardage earned per game (1989-1997) - 27th, 28th, 9th, 4th*, 4th*, 8th, 5th*, 24th, 20th
Yardage earned per game (2010-2018) - 7th, 11th, 6th, 16th, 7th, 22nd, 5th, 14th, 22nd
[*Denotes Super Bowl team]
__
Assuming you're still hanging around at this point, because your brain stop functioning when reading something longer than a meme, you likely noticed the Super Bowl-winning Cowboys' teams from the 1990s each had both an offense and defense ranked in the top-10 that respective season.
Contrarily, the team has had a top-10 offense only twice since 2010 -- only once in the ppg category -- with neither of those units being tethered to a defense that broke into the top 15 of the league those years. The bottom line in this comparison is while Garrett has continuously been strapped with roster and coordinator issues on both sides of the ball (again, that part is most certainly on him), Johnson was the beneficiary of a cap-less league and a version of Jones that made Hall of Fame talent rain from the free agency sky -- Switzer taking advantage by later hopping in the Ferrari and riding it until the wheels fell off.
Something to consider, especially considering how building through the NFL Draft takes years and is a process, as hyperbolic as that sounds. Piecing together a winning team in the 1990s was as easy as being the salesman with deeper pockets who tossed more money on the table. Those days are long gone now, and it's why the large majority of teams who sacrifice huge sums of their cap space to overpay free agency whales find themselves out of the playoffs that same year or shortly thereafter, with the whale being sent back out to sea an average of two seasons after signing their monster deal.
It happens all the time.
Give Garrett a more capable offensive coordinator (even if by executive force), the likely and deserved extension headed his way, a break from the sizzling takes and some extra hand moisturizer to prevent chaffing when the claps hit fever pitch, and the Cowboys will be an instant Super Bowl contender for a long time to come. Many will disagree simply because they want him gone -- until they realize that might lead to Linehan (the actual issue) becoming head coach -- so I'll take the chains off of the doors now so Garrett's (sometimes willfully blind) detractors can re-join the conversation. Their screams from outside have been rattling the walls this entire time, and it's beginning to disturb our meal that consists of produce plucked from atop the tree.
Either they're dying to regale us with something Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith said, or it's the sound of them retching from consuming fruit that hung too close to the ground.
Who are we kidding? It's both.
The danger with low-hanging fruit? It's the most likely to be infested with insects.
Such is the case when it comes time to assess whatever ails the Dallas Cowboys at any given moment though, because most won't peel back anymore than one layer of the onion before they start crying. Take head coach Jason Garrett for example, easily one of the more vilified individuals in the NFL on a perennial basis. When things are going poorly for the Cowboys at any given point in time, nearly 100% of the blame is heaped upon Garrett -- from a coaching standpoint. In those moments when things go exceedingly well, however, suddenly it's everyone else who's due the credit. A microcosm of this truth is the 2018 season itself, one that's seen the Cowboys consistently field one of the worst offenses in the league while also boasting one of the best defenses around.
It's Garrett who gets blamed for the former while defensive coordinator Rod Marinelli and passing game coordinator Kris Richard are showered with praise for the latter, but that's disingenuous when you consider Garrett is the head coach of both the offense and the defense. That being the case, if Marinelli and Richard are supposedly the sole reason(s) for defensive success, then shouldn't Scott Linehan be the sole person to blame for the fact the Cowboys averaged just 21.2 points per game in this year's regular season (22nd) -- with that number dipping below 20 ppg on more than one occasion -- despite having the league's leading rusher, a 1,000-yard receiver and the former NFL Rookie of the Year at quarterback?
That is the (il)logic, of course.
I haven't given you my opinion of Garrett just yet and some of you are already labeling this as a truther-piece in his favor, because you're being described above. There's an inherent irony there, you should (but won't) explore, but you're also about to find out what I truly think of him and the coaching staff as a whole -- with the lazy narratives now out of the way.
Garrett makes mistakes, yes, and sometimes they're brutal.
The biggest one thus far has been to keep the aforementioned Linehan on staff, despite reports of the team nearly firing him on two separate occasions in 2018 -- once in January and at another point during the bye week when the team was 3-4. EVP Stephen Jones disputed the claims, but there's merit in them when you assess the scheme issues that cost the Cowboys a playoff berth in 2017 and just how abysmal the offense was from that point to the midway mark of this season. It's why one anonymous player on the team told Albert Breer of SI.com in October, noting Linehan "better tighten up" going forward, and veteran wide receiver labeled a play that resulted in an interception against the Houston Texans as the "worst play call you would make on that coverage".
From Dez Bryant's questions surrounding the scheme to Hurns' declaration to Amari Cooper telling quarterback Dak Prescott he didn't want to run the called in route against the Eagles in Week 14 -- due to Philadelphia having sat on such routes all game -- it's impossible to see this trend and bird box your way past Linehan to land solely on Garrett in that offensive blame game.
Is the longtime head coach absolved from all accountability there, though?
Not in the least, because you ultimately are who you choose to employ, and the loyalty that flows from Garrett to Linehan has handcuffed the Cowboys more often than not in recent history. The latter being responsible for granting the former his first-ever coaching job with the Miami Dolphins in 2005, there's an obvious affinity that exists between the two -- for better or for worse. It's a dynamic that could very well keep Dallas out of the Super Bowl LIII in February, if star players don't continue to make big plays despite their own offensive coordinator and not because of him. There can be no argument regarding the football IQ of Linehan, a brilliant mind and a proven coordinator several times over in the NFL, but the debate regarding his inability and/or unwillingness to adapt on a consistent basis is a sound one.
He's still calling plays in 2018 as if it were somehow still 2016, or even the front end of 2017, and barring the occasional well-timed and ovation-worthy call -- it's mostly an uber-conservative cauldron of predictability. It's cost the Cowboys games at times, and a veto from Garrett in certain situational instances would have surely been welcome, but never arrived to save the day. If he chooses to keep Linehan on staff in 2019, a possible but still far-from-guaranteed decision, Garrett will undoubtedly have to put a bigger fingerprint on the play-calling in some capacity. He already has begun to do so, if you haven't noticed, with the Cowboys' gameplan looking a bit different in some aspects as of late -- including wrinkles not seen all year.
Plus, Jones and Garrett have already admitted as much, adding that much more credence to the reality of a looming extension. He hasn't (yet) re-assumed play-calling duties though, but stay tuned to what happens offensively throughout the playoffs. If things go awry on that side of the ball and the ultimatum from Jones is positioned as "extension or your OC", you better believe Garrett will choose his own job security.
As far as the other errors accountable to Garrett, none are nearly as egregious as the Linehan dynamic, despite what your favorite national sports network has fed you. Anyone expecting him to be perfect only does so because they need to retain a platform to morph even his slightest mistakes into billboard material when, in actuality, they're really not that big of a deal and routinely found in the habits of top coaches around the league. One example would be seeing Garrett raked over the coals going into the bye week with a 3-4 record, despite having not lost two consecutive games up to that point as the team worked to get things turned around.
Sean McVay and the Los Angeles Rams, whom the Cowboys will face in the Divisional Round, lost two consecutive games in December and coughed up the No. 1 seed to the New Orleans Saints -- to little criticism.
"The Rams had an eight-game win streak to start the season, though! That's why!" - You
That's fair, but McVay has never registered an 11-game win streak as a head coach. Garrett has, and he did it with two rookies leading the way in 2016 en route to Head Coach of the Year honors. This isn't to take away from the brilliance that is McVay, but instead to adjust perspective on what the Cowboys have in Garrett, even if some believe he's growing a bit long in the tooth. To that point, changing simply for the sake of change is an absurd reason to do anything in business (or life), which is why those who set their morning alarm to wake up and lobby for Garrett to be fired should ready themselves for a lot more days of doing just that.
Not only is Garrett not going to be jettisoned at this point, but he'll likely land a contract extension soon -- of the five-year variety.
Currently signed through the 2019 season, the seat was justifiably hot beneath his bottom leading into this past September and the slow start didn't help his cause. Owner Jerry Jones never showed a crack in his armor of support for Garrett, even when there likely was one or two floating around that "I don't have time to have a bad time" brain of his. The Hall of Fame owner knows he isn't immortal and the recent death of Texans' owner Bob McNair -- a close friend of Jones -- truly served as a reminder of The Clock hovering above him. Should the wheels had fully come off in 2018, odds of Garrett being met with a pink slip would've been quite high. At worst (for him), he might've been fired this offseason and at best, Jones would've allowed him to coach out the final year of his deal.
With the troops rallied in a fashion a rare few other coaches could muster, Garrett has proven he deserves to hang around and you should expect that to be the case. With a 3-5 record following the humiliating Week 9 loss to the Tennessee Titans -- the only home loss suffered all season -- and preparing to face the surging Eagles in unforgiving Eastern Pennsylvania, it would've taken absolutely nothing for the Cowboys to wave the white flag on 2018. They were underdogs in that game and staring at the most brutal stretch of schedule in the NFL, after all, with only an infinitesimal chance of making the playoffs. It wouldn't be the first time a team has given up on their coach, as evidenced recently when the Eagles did so just ahead of Chip Kelly being fired, but something different happened in the Cowboys' locker room.
Something...special.
With their backs against the wall, the house burning to the ground and the cocker spaniels all fleeing through the nearby open window, Dallas didn't take the easy way out and chase fresh air. They instead beat back to the flames and rattled off a five-game win streak, including a sweep of the Eagles and an all-impressive curb-stomp of the Saints to propel themselves to their third NFC East crown in the past three years. This could only happen if players remain bought-in on what a head coach is preaching, and few organizations can boast the type of player-coach relationship seen in Dallas. Including being named interim in 2010, this is Garrett's ninth-year (8.5 as the head coach) with the club, and he has never once lost control of his locker room in nearly a decade.
Now far removed from the longstanding 8-8 narrative, Garrett is 77-59 in the regular season and 48-32 in his last five years.
Postseason success has eluded him for several reasons, be it an ill-timed fumble, a controversial overturned catch, or the like, but he's now 2-2 following the Wild Card win over the Seattle Seahawks. It's also safe to assume his regular season record would be much better if not for the abhorrent 2015, when Jones and Co. forced the likes of Brandon Weeden, Matt Cassel and Kellen Moore onto Garrett to replace the injured Tony Romo. They went 1-11 that season without the four-time pro bowler, and it took Garrett helping to morph Dak Prescott from a fourth-round comp pick on the bubble in training camp to the franchise-saving QB who prevented 2016 from being a deja vu moment.
Well played, and if they defeat the Los Angeles Rams in this year's Divisional Round -- put Garrett in the conversation for a possible second HCOTY honor in only three years for what he will have accomplished when all the chips were down in 2018.
(Photo: Kyle Terada, USA TODAY Sports)
"He's been here too long with no Super Bowl win!" - You
In a league that puts head coaches on an egg timer, Garrett remains of the few who have bucked the trend, and here's a list of some who had more tenure through December:
Bill Belichick - 18 seasons
Marvin Lewis* - 15 seasons
Mike McCarthy* - 12 seasons
Sean Payton - 12 seasons
[*Indicates fired in 2018]
__
What's interesting here is outside of Belichick, no coach listed has more than one Super Bowl ring and Lewis leaves the Bengals with none at all. He's also defeated an all-powerful Saints team led by Payton on two separate occasions when the Cowboys were projected to get disemboweled, another forehead-raising stat. It bears mentioning that even the illustrious and incomparable Tom Landry, the only coach who held a longer tenure in Dallas than Garrett, didn't make it to his first Super Bowl until his 11th season -- losing before winning it in his 12th.
I'm sure social media would've given Landry a fair shot at righting the ship, though. I'm willing to bet all of absolutely nothing at all on it.
Extrapolating for the officiating debacle against the Green Bay Packers in the 2014 NFC Divisional Round -- along with the aforementioned fumble by running back DeMarco Murray -- it's quite feasible Garrett would've led the Cowboys to a Super Bowl ring that year. Instead, he's still hard at work trying to bring the ever-elusive sixth Lombardi to Dallas, with the league's post-mortem confession regarding the catch on Bryant now being wholly inconsequential. After all, NFL gonna NFL, and it's another variable to consider when assessing how you believe Garrett has done and is doing at the helm for the most visible and most valuable sports franchise on the planet.
The 2018 season began as terrifyingly bad as 2015, when the Cowboys entered Week 8 with a 2-5 record, but ended with the fragrance of 2016 -- a year wherein they won six of their last eight games. This one's already more special than the record-setting 13-3 from two years ago though, because it involved being shoved into an early grave and being forced to climb out with one of their wrists handcuffed to one of their ankles. The defense has been supreme and Lombardi-worthy, but Garrett has remained able to mount the troops in the face of a questionable offensive coordinator -- one he makes the mistake of holding onto longer than necessary.
If you're going to blame him for something, make sure it's that decision, and not the fact he took in a World Series game on his day off. It doesn't matter what he does on his day off, as long as he keeps the heat on when he steps in the building at work.
From being named the most likely head coach to be fired to now readying for the NFC Divisional Round, there are definitely some things Garrett could improve upon, but those are far outnumbered by everything he does well. A leader of men in the same mold as his former coach, Jimmy Johnson -- who tasked Norv Turner with coordinating and leading the dynasty offense of the early- to mid-1990s -- the Cowboys have all the pieces in place on the defensive side of the coaching equation (assuming Kris Richard stays put, as expected) and need only a reboot at offensive coordinator to fix the final piece of what truly ails the organization.
Think about it, what if Johnson had Linehan instead of Turner? What if Garrett had Turner instead of Linehan?
Johnson had a regular season record in Dallas of just 44-36 with the Cowboys before the infamous divorce. The glaring difference is of course Johnson's postseason mark of 9-4 with two Super Bowl wins, but the new iteration of the Doomsday Defense that's building in Dallas is new to Garrett as a HC -- as are some other things Johnson was blessed with in an era with no salary cap and a much less frugal front office. From the blockbuster Herschel Walker trade to signing Deion Sanders to landing Charles Haley and lots in-between, it makes you wonder if Johnson could replicate the success he had then with the 2010-2019 Cowboys.
He rightfully remains immortal in the ranks of Cowboys' coaches, but his 36-28 record -- not exactly fantastic -- with the Miami Dolphins was followed up with a 2-3 postseason record that included missing the playoffs altogether in his first season there. Meanwhile, with Johnson's roster in tow, first-time NFL head coach Barry Switzer stepped in and went 34-14 in his first three seasons as Cowboys' head coach, and had a stellar postseason record of 5-2 with a Super Bowl victory before the NFL salary cap truly took hold and began to negatively impact the Cowboys' ability to retain all of their Hall of Fame talent.
Even transitioning from Turner to Ernie Zampese didn't cause a hiccup in the legendary offense, the team going on to be the No. 2- and No. 3-ranked unit in Zampese's first two years as the offensive coordinator. Taking nothing away from Turner or Johnson, there's a legitimate question here regarding how much easier a coach's job can be when the roster is built to dominate. Garrett could've likely accomplished what Switzer did when you begin considering all the variables, but the odds Switzer could take any of Garrett's teams deep into the postseason is -- to put it plainly -- quite laughable.
Let's take a look at how the two eras of Cowboys' stack up against each other, as ranked against the rest of the league based on key categories.
__
DEFENSE:
Points allowed per game (1989-1997) - 24th, 15th, 17th, 5th*, 2nd*, 3rd, 3rd*, 3rd, 15th
Points allowed per game (2010-2018) - 31st, 16th, 24th, 26th, 15th, 31st, 5th, 13th, 3rd
__
Yardage allowed per game (1989-1997) - 20th, 10th, 17th, 1st*, 10th*, 1st, 9th*, 3rd, 2nd
Yardage allowed per game (2010-2018) - 23rd, 14th, 19th, 32nd, 19th, 17th, 14th, 8th, 7th
__
OFFENSE:
Points scored per game (1989-1997) - 28th, 26th, 7th, 2nd*, 2nd*, 2nd, 3rd*, 25th, 27th
Points scored per game (2010-2018) - 7th, 15th, 15th, 5th, 5th, 31st, 5th, 14th, 22nd
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Yardage earned per game (1989-1997) - 27th, 28th, 9th, 4th*, 4th*, 8th, 5th*, 24th, 20th
Yardage earned per game (2010-2018) - 7th, 11th, 6th, 16th, 7th, 22nd, 5th, 14th, 22nd
[*Denotes Super Bowl team]
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Assuming you're still hanging around at this point, because your brain stop functioning when reading something longer than a meme, you likely noticed the Super Bowl-winning Cowboys' teams from the 1990s each had both an offense and defense ranked in the top-10 that respective season.
Contrarily, the team has had a top-10 offense only twice since 2010 -- only once in the ppg category -- with neither of those units being tethered to a defense that broke into the top 15 of the league those years. The bottom line in this comparison is while Garrett has continuously been strapped with roster and coordinator issues on both sides of the ball (again, that part is most certainly on him), Johnson was the beneficiary of a cap-less league and a version of Jones that made Hall of Fame talent rain from the free agency sky -- Switzer taking advantage by later hopping in the Ferrari and riding it until the wheels fell off.
Something to consider, especially considering how building through the NFL Draft takes years and is a process, as hyperbolic as that sounds. Piecing together a winning team in the 1990s was as easy as being the salesman with deeper pockets who tossed more money on the table. Those days are long gone now, and it's why the large majority of teams who sacrifice huge sums of their cap space to overpay free agency whales find themselves out of the playoffs that same year or shortly thereafter, with the whale being sent back out to sea an average of two seasons after signing their monster deal.
It happens all the time.
Give Garrett a more capable offensive coordinator (even if by executive force), the likely and deserved extension headed his way, a break from the sizzling takes and some extra hand moisturizer to prevent chaffing when the claps hit fever pitch, and the Cowboys will be an instant Super Bowl contender for a long time to come. Many will disagree simply because they want him gone -- until they realize that might lead to Linehan (the actual issue) becoming head coach -- so I'll take the chains off of the doors now so Garrett's (sometimes willfully blind) detractors can re-join the conversation. Their screams from outside have been rattling the walls this entire time, and it's beginning to disturb our meal that consists of produce plucked from atop the tree.
Either they're dying to regale us with something Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith said, or it's the sound of them retching from consuming fruit that hung too close to the ground.
Who are we kidding? It's both.
