Smitty
DCC 4Life
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I'm not putting in all the tweets because, well, that's a pain in the ass. You can get the info from the text close enough.
Examining the Cowboys’ Jason Garrett era: The unpardonable sins of 2011-2013
By Bob Sturm May 18, 2020
59
This shall forever be known as “Jason Garrett Week” here in my little corner of The Athletic. I wanted to let the smoke clear and the tensions fade, and the time is right. Only two coaches in franchise history coached more than 80 regular-season games in Dallas: Tom Landry’s 418 and Jason Garrett’s 152. Enough books to fill a library have been written about Landry, so the least I can do is write a few pieces about the man who oversaw the Dallas sideline for 10 seasons. I invite you to treat these stories as a series and read each part as I close the book on a very memorable and frustrating era of Cowboys football before we cleanse our palates for the new dawn in 2020.
“I would have fired him long ago.”
Forgive me for quoting myself, as that can be quite rude. But this became my stock answer at some point over the thousands of times I was asked about Jason Garrett’s coaching tenure by the time we got to 2016. Or 2017. And 2018 or 2019. So, yes, by the time we were coming down the stretch of this latest season, it had literally felt like the Cowboys had been extending him mulligans and second chances for as long as I can remember. Let’s be clear: Nobody in this business wants people to lose their jobs. Everyone has empathy for the difficulty of doing a job well and for decent humans finding success in a very difficult situation, but there is also the question of whether being a very nice human qualifies you for an indefinite job running the Dallas Cowboys. From the perspective of someone tasked to cover this team since 1998, I certainly have attempted to slow play my decisions and to allow a man to fail and learn before we suggest it is time to try a new coach. I try to be patient and understand that any new job requires a growth period, but when the growth appears to have halted, I do grow tired of what appears to be stubbornness about the coach.
This is Jason Garrett Week, and most of it will probably be a biting analysis of moments where this team clearly underachieved due to the head coach, but I would also stress that an alternative name for this exercise would be Jerry Jones Week. Jerry does the hiring and firing, and if we have learned anything from his three decades, it is that he can’t get these simple tasks right. His main job, unless you really think he scouts and selects players like normal general managers, is to hire and maintain good coaches and fire the bad ones. If he could get that simple job description right, this franchise would probably win more. Keep the good coaches and fire the bad ones. Easy, right? But he was quick to break up with his two most competent and successful coaches — Jimmy Johnson and Bill Parcells. We could re-litigate both cases, but the evidence shows that he chased both away due to their insistence of having things their way as he preferred to have it his, alongside a heaping share of the credit. On the flip side, he simply could not fire Jason Garrett no matter how thoroughly Garrett earned it.
Jason Garrett did many things very well. In fact, I will dedicate my third piece this week to that entire list. But the thing that seemed to be most vital for his entire existence past 2012 or 2013 was how well he got along with the Jones family. He was the dream coach they always wanted in that he would abide by their rules and boundaries and work well within their structure. Why didn’t Johnson and Parcells listen as well as Garrett did, they must have wondered. Well, he did a wonderful job of keeping his bosses happy, so that he lasted longer than almost any modern coach who never even won a single playoff game beyond the wild-card round. They have generally seemed more interested in a pleasant working experience with their coach than a hard-driving and difficult head-man who would maximize their win total.
Maybe the best way to describe Garrett and his memory is through those of us who want to qualify every critique of the man by talking about how good a guy and nice a man he seemed. We feel dirty for suggesting how much time was wasted trying to make him work. See, we are charmed, too. Just like the Jones family. His best quality is that he was incredibly likable, and that took him places. But it didn’t get him to the Super Bowl. Or even close, it seems.
Today, as inspired by one of our great readers, I shall begin the task set below:
Nick wants me to assemble the most fireable moments of the Garrett era, and I have spent the weekend putting them together. This will take two entries, as he coached for 10 years. Today’s entry will include 2010-2014, and then we will cover 2015-2019 next time. Here we go.
No. 1 – October 2nd, 2011 — Detroit
In a game against the Lions where the Cowboys led 27-3 in the third quarter, the team was unable to usher home that lead and get a victory. Instead, the quarterback would throw three interceptions in the second half with two of them being pick-sixes. The Lions went on a 31-3 run to finish the game and left the 2011 Cowboys behind the eight ball in a game that was badly butchered by coach and QB. Jason Garrett’s first full season began with an inexcusable exhibition of incompetent football.
Hopefully, we will all look back at this and laugh someday. Surely, these are merely some early growing pains.
No. 2 – October 16th, 2011 — at New England
It’s not advisable to fire your coach when he hasn’t even coached 16 games yet. But this was the first time any of us were concerned that the Cowboys’ new “offensive coach” went full-conservative in a close road game and called three consecutive run plays that lost yardage when they were ahead 16-13 and had the ball in Foxboro late in the fourth quarter of a game. We knew what would probably happen if the Cowboys gave the ball back to Tom Brady with two minutes to go. Bill Nagy, Phil Costa and rookie Tyron Smith were not ready to move the chains, and a fantastic effort in New England went for naught despite Dallas being in a real position to win. And that will be the theme. The Cowboys were in a great position to win a game and still lost.
Yikes. Twice in the first six games of 2011, we are wondering how a coach could be playing so fast and loose with wins.
No. 3 – December 4th, 2011 — at Arizona
This was the first time that everyone started getting pretty concerned about Garrett’s “in-game” coaching ability due to his losing of the plot again to end the Arizona game and appearing to ice his own kicker. Everyone will talk about calling a timeout right before the snap and “icing your own kicker,” as Dan Bailey makes the kick, then misses the re-kick. But the actual issue of a coach not helping increase the win probability is absolutely having time to stop the clock multiple times when Tony Romo hits Dez Bryant for 14 yards with :25 to play. Instead, they don’t do anything but let the clock run down.
Here is the piece I wrote that day:
And one of the reasons for this defeat – not the only reason by a long-shot – was the way their coach seemed to lose the plot a bit down the stretch in the final moments of the contest. Jason Garrett and his offense had just converted a very difficult 3rd and 11 when Tony Romo made yet another late-game play on a throw to Dez Bryant and set the Cowboys up at the Cardinals 31-yard line. As a point of reference, there was about :25 left in the game when Dez rose to his feet. The Cowboys owned 2 timeouts at this juncture, and despite that reality, the Cowboys did not stop the clock until Romo clocked the ball with :07 left. The waste of 18 precious seconds made very little sense really.
But, to me, this demonstrates a problem that I have felt has been in place since Jason Garrett was hired last November. The job of head coach is one that I believe fits him well. However, the job of Head Coach on top of his prior post of offensive coordinator is too big in my opinion for most in the early portion of their coaching career. Very few people know how many decisions a head coach must make in 3 hours. I imagine, only those who have done it would know for sure. Now, add in a couple hundred more decisions that any offensive coordinator must make and put them all inside the head of one human. Surely, it must make someone feel like the most important human in the world to make all of those decisions for the Dallas Cowboys. But, every time I see a challenge call that should have been used, a timeout wasted, a 12-men on the field penalty, a needless delay of game (which happened about a minute earlier), or something else that proves curious (forgetting a key weapon for several possessions in a row) I always come back to feeling like Jason Garrett is trying to do too much.
I would not have fired him for this game, either. It is his first full season. But we are making note of multiple cases now.
No. 4 – October 14th, 2012 — at Baltimore
This is where the body of evidence is starting to grow, because in Baltimore, the Cowboys botched another game and turned a dramatic and unlikely win into another hard-fought loss with a series of events that so resembled the Arizona debacle on a number of levels.
Again, from my Morning After piece:
In this fifth game in 2012, the situation was slightly different. It was a short pass to Dez Bryant who was tackled with :22 left. The Cowboys held one timeout. It was now second down and the easy thing to do here would be to clock the ball with :14 or so and preserve time for at least one more snap and throw to anywhere on the field – knowing that you still have one last timeout to get the field goal unit back on the field.
Instead, the clock ran and ran before the timeout was finally called with :03 left. The Cowboys left Dan Bailey to try another field goal from 51 yards away, which he missed. It isn’t the coach’s fault his kicker missed. But it is the coach’s fault he again did not maximize the win probabilities by decreasing the distance with the remaining resources of time and timeouts.
If my coach is butchering significant moments in significant games repeatedly, how can I blindly stand by and offer support for his overall program? Either he gets it right or he gets the assistance he needs to get it right. Hiring a play-caller last spring wouldn’t have assured anyone that Bailey makes a kick. But, it would likely make many of us feel better that they did everything they could to increase their chances. A great coach sees short-comings on his team – even if it is in the mirror. Again, I am not trying to hang this around the neck of Jason Garrett. But, I sure wish he didn’t offer so many opportunities for the media to do just that.
Patience was beginning to run thin, as a team that finished 8-8 annually was seemingly giving away two wins per season. 10-6 might just be a matter of having a coach who understood these things.
No. 5 – December 30th, 2012 — at Washington
In this situation, with the NFC East on the line and playing against a team with a QB who had wrecked his knee and could hardly move, the Cowboys played one of their worst games of the era.
From that game’s Morning After:
Did you know the Cowboys had the ball in Washington territory on 8 of their first 9 possessions last night? 8 times on the Washington end of the field in their first 9 possessions (they only had 11 – the 10th possession was the interception to Jackson and the 11th possession was the garbage time sequence with 1 minute left) only resulted in 3 scores. 3 others ended in punts from plus territory and then, of course, the 2 interceptions that both ended drives early.
That is why this offensive performance must be positioned as nothing short of a failure. The job, in particular by Tony Romo – the man who is most responsible for the Cowboys being in this position to begin with – was just not nearly at the level it needed to be to win a tough divisional road game on the final night of the season. Romo, as I am sure you are well aware, picked a horrendous time for his 4th multi-interception game of 2012. In those 4 games, as you might imagine, the Cowboys were winless. The first 3 were home games against the Bears, Giants, and these same Redskins, but this one had all of the trimmings of a playoff game and the picks were all damaging and key. But, no interception of Romo’s career might hurt as much as the last one of 2012. For that was a pick that comes down to that moment that everyone dreams when they discuss the credentials of their favorite QB. They always ask the question, “can this guy get your team down the field on that one drive with everything on the line?”
And later that week,
Jason Garrett is a bright offensive mind, but I also believe that he has had more than enough time to sort this offense better than he has. You could make the case that he was sabotaged by a poor personnel offseason as it pertains to the offensive line, but 6 years is a long time. 6 years for a play-caller and a QB to work together is a very rare luxury in the NFL, generally afforded to iconic offenses that are clearly not broken so there is no need to fix them. This offense, on the other hand, is never confused for flawless, and looks more problematic every year, despite continuity at QB and near perfect health all season on the unit.
By the final whistle of 2012, I had enough of Jason Garrett. Sure, 40 games isn’t a long time for a head coach, but the true math added up to way more than that. It was 99 games in total from the time of his hire in 2007 working with Tony Romo and the offense. And here at the end of 2012, their partnership was almost as long as anyone in the industry who did not have a Super Bowl appearance. They still were losing winnable games and missing the playoffs. It made no sense. Enough time had passed. And there were enough examples.
This was the first time I thought Jason Garrett should have been fired. Not because of that one game and that one collapse, but because they were 16-16 in those two seasons with a fully fit Tony Romo, and at worst, they should have been 20-12 with two divisional titles and playoff berths. Underachieving at this level cannot go on and on.
This one was truly fireable. The Cowboys needed a new coach. They would not get one for seven more years.
No. 6 – December 15th, 2013 – Green Bay
They were playing a team with Matt Flynn at QB. An organization that had gone 1-4-1 since Aaron Rodgers had been injured. The Cowboys were up 26-3 at halftime in a game they had to win in Week 15 of a season after a four-year playoff drought. They played arguably the worst half of home football in the history of the franchise and lost to a backup QB and a team that had pretty much given up.
Surely, this was the last straw. Amazingly, it was not. The December 15 performance, on the heels of the Washington loss in 2012, demonstrated that perhaps nothing could get Jason Garrett fired. I wrote the next day.
Teams don’t blow leads of that magnitude very often – in fact, according to Scott Kacsmar, the NFL has only blown 3 home leads of this size since 1999. 3 times, of which the Cowboys have authored 2 of the 3 with Jason Garrett and Tony Romo at the helm. That’s right. The Cowboys have done it twice in the last 3 seasons with this loss and the home loss to Detroit back in 2011 (when they enjoyed a 27-3 lead early in the 3rd Quarter before ultimately losing).
Realizing that the margin for error in both of those seasons is a single win separating a divisional title from another season on the outside of the playoffs, those facts alone might be enough to get many coaches fired under the “fireable offenses” bylaws that circulate around professional football.
We can get to the discussion of how close the Jason Garrett era is to ending in the next 14 days where it will either be put to bed or it will happen, as I am now convinced that the next 2 weeks decide his job future 100%. This loss is unpardonable on the heels of the disaster in Chicago and considering the way this team has a history of playing just well enough to stay alive in the race until the end and just poor enough to spit the bit at the moment of truth.
They would not win out and they would miss the playoffs again. And it still didn’t matter. They did not fire Jason Garrett again. He would survive to coach six more years.
As you know, 2014 would really offer the false dawn of the Garrett era turning a corner. Surely, 2011-13 was simply a finishing school. After the great 2014 and the bad beat in the playoffs, the Jones family will be rewarded for patience and understanding that it sometimes takes a bit to figure things out. Heck, even I had started to second guess and confess that perhaps I had been too hasty. Maybe Jason Garrett was actually an elite NFL coach.
2015-19 would, unfortunately, refute that case. But despite all of these incidents in his first five seasons, he would receive another five years before the Cowboys would admit that he wasn’t the guy they hoped he was to return the franchise to the promised land. It was truly a lost decade.
Next time, we will detail the many wrong turns from the post-Tony Romo era.
Examining the Cowboys’ Jason Garrett era: The unpardonable sins of 2011-2013
By Bob Sturm May 18, 2020
This shall forever be known as “Jason Garrett Week” here in my little corner of The Athletic. I wanted to let the smoke clear and the tensions fade, and the time is right. Only two coaches in franchise history coached more than 80 regular-season games in Dallas: Tom Landry’s 418 and Jason Garrett’s 152. Enough books to fill a library have been written about Landry, so the least I can do is write a few pieces about the man who oversaw the Dallas sideline for 10 seasons. I invite you to treat these stories as a series and read each part as I close the book on a very memorable and frustrating era of Cowboys football before we cleanse our palates for the new dawn in 2020.
“I would have fired him long ago.”
Forgive me for quoting myself, as that can be quite rude. But this became my stock answer at some point over the thousands of times I was asked about Jason Garrett’s coaching tenure by the time we got to 2016. Or 2017. And 2018 or 2019. So, yes, by the time we were coming down the stretch of this latest season, it had literally felt like the Cowboys had been extending him mulligans and second chances for as long as I can remember. Let’s be clear: Nobody in this business wants people to lose their jobs. Everyone has empathy for the difficulty of doing a job well and for decent humans finding success in a very difficult situation, but there is also the question of whether being a very nice human qualifies you for an indefinite job running the Dallas Cowboys. From the perspective of someone tasked to cover this team since 1998, I certainly have attempted to slow play my decisions and to allow a man to fail and learn before we suggest it is time to try a new coach. I try to be patient and understand that any new job requires a growth period, but when the growth appears to have halted, I do grow tired of what appears to be stubbornness about the coach.
This is Jason Garrett Week, and most of it will probably be a biting analysis of moments where this team clearly underachieved due to the head coach, but I would also stress that an alternative name for this exercise would be Jerry Jones Week. Jerry does the hiring and firing, and if we have learned anything from his three decades, it is that he can’t get these simple tasks right. His main job, unless you really think he scouts and selects players like normal general managers, is to hire and maintain good coaches and fire the bad ones. If he could get that simple job description right, this franchise would probably win more. Keep the good coaches and fire the bad ones. Easy, right? But he was quick to break up with his two most competent and successful coaches — Jimmy Johnson and Bill Parcells. We could re-litigate both cases, but the evidence shows that he chased both away due to their insistence of having things their way as he preferred to have it his, alongside a heaping share of the credit. On the flip side, he simply could not fire Jason Garrett no matter how thoroughly Garrett earned it.
Jason Garrett did many things very well. In fact, I will dedicate my third piece this week to that entire list. But the thing that seemed to be most vital for his entire existence past 2012 or 2013 was how well he got along with the Jones family. He was the dream coach they always wanted in that he would abide by their rules and boundaries and work well within their structure. Why didn’t Johnson and Parcells listen as well as Garrett did, they must have wondered. Well, he did a wonderful job of keeping his bosses happy, so that he lasted longer than almost any modern coach who never even won a single playoff game beyond the wild-card round. They have generally seemed more interested in a pleasant working experience with their coach than a hard-driving and difficult head-man who would maximize their win total.
Maybe the best way to describe Garrett and his memory is through those of us who want to qualify every critique of the man by talking about how good a guy and nice a man he seemed. We feel dirty for suggesting how much time was wasted trying to make him work. See, we are charmed, too. Just like the Jones family. His best quality is that he was incredibly likable, and that took him places. But it didn’t get him to the Super Bowl. Or even close, it seems.
Today, as inspired by one of our great readers, I shall begin the task set below:
Nick wants me to assemble the most fireable moments of the Garrett era, and I have spent the weekend putting them together. This will take two entries, as he coached for 10 years. Today’s entry will include 2010-2014, and then we will cover 2015-2019 next time. Here we go.
No. 1 – October 2nd, 2011 — Detroit
In a game against the Lions where the Cowboys led 27-3 in the third quarter, the team was unable to usher home that lead and get a victory. Instead, the quarterback would throw three interceptions in the second half with two of them being pick-sixes. The Lions went on a 31-3 run to finish the game and left the 2011 Cowboys behind the eight ball in a game that was badly butchered by coach and QB. Jason Garrett’s first full season began with an inexcusable exhibition of incompetent football.
Hopefully, we will all look back at this and laugh someday. Surely, these are merely some early growing pains.
No. 2 – October 16th, 2011 — at New England
It’s not advisable to fire your coach when he hasn’t even coached 16 games yet. But this was the first time any of us were concerned that the Cowboys’ new “offensive coach” went full-conservative in a close road game and called three consecutive run plays that lost yardage when they were ahead 16-13 and had the ball in Foxboro late in the fourth quarter of a game. We knew what would probably happen if the Cowboys gave the ball back to Tom Brady with two minutes to go. Bill Nagy, Phil Costa and rookie Tyron Smith were not ready to move the chains, and a fantastic effort in New England went for naught despite Dallas being in a real position to win. And that will be the theme. The Cowboys were in a great position to win a game and still lost.
Yikes. Twice in the first six games of 2011, we are wondering how a coach could be playing so fast and loose with wins.
No. 3 – December 4th, 2011 — at Arizona
This was the first time that everyone started getting pretty concerned about Garrett’s “in-game” coaching ability due to his losing of the plot again to end the Arizona game and appearing to ice his own kicker. Everyone will talk about calling a timeout right before the snap and “icing your own kicker,” as Dan Bailey makes the kick, then misses the re-kick. But the actual issue of a coach not helping increase the win probability is absolutely having time to stop the clock multiple times when Tony Romo hits Dez Bryant for 14 yards with :25 to play. Instead, they don’t do anything but let the clock run down.
Here is the piece I wrote that day:
And one of the reasons for this defeat – not the only reason by a long-shot – was the way their coach seemed to lose the plot a bit down the stretch in the final moments of the contest. Jason Garrett and his offense had just converted a very difficult 3rd and 11 when Tony Romo made yet another late-game play on a throw to Dez Bryant and set the Cowboys up at the Cardinals 31-yard line. As a point of reference, there was about :25 left in the game when Dez rose to his feet. The Cowboys owned 2 timeouts at this juncture, and despite that reality, the Cowboys did not stop the clock until Romo clocked the ball with :07 left. The waste of 18 precious seconds made very little sense really.
But, to me, this demonstrates a problem that I have felt has been in place since Jason Garrett was hired last November. The job of head coach is one that I believe fits him well. However, the job of Head Coach on top of his prior post of offensive coordinator is too big in my opinion for most in the early portion of their coaching career. Very few people know how many decisions a head coach must make in 3 hours. I imagine, only those who have done it would know for sure. Now, add in a couple hundred more decisions that any offensive coordinator must make and put them all inside the head of one human. Surely, it must make someone feel like the most important human in the world to make all of those decisions for the Dallas Cowboys. But, every time I see a challenge call that should have been used, a timeout wasted, a 12-men on the field penalty, a needless delay of game (which happened about a minute earlier), or something else that proves curious (forgetting a key weapon for several possessions in a row) I always come back to feeling like Jason Garrett is trying to do too much.
I would not have fired him for this game, either. It is his first full season. But we are making note of multiple cases now.
No. 4 – October 14th, 2012 — at Baltimore
This is where the body of evidence is starting to grow, because in Baltimore, the Cowboys botched another game and turned a dramatic and unlikely win into another hard-fought loss with a series of events that so resembled the Arizona debacle on a number of levels.
Again, from my Morning After piece:
In this fifth game in 2012, the situation was slightly different. It was a short pass to Dez Bryant who was tackled with :22 left. The Cowboys held one timeout. It was now second down and the easy thing to do here would be to clock the ball with :14 or so and preserve time for at least one more snap and throw to anywhere on the field – knowing that you still have one last timeout to get the field goal unit back on the field.
Instead, the clock ran and ran before the timeout was finally called with :03 left. The Cowboys left Dan Bailey to try another field goal from 51 yards away, which he missed. It isn’t the coach’s fault his kicker missed. But it is the coach’s fault he again did not maximize the win probabilities by decreasing the distance with the remaining resources of time and timeouts.
If my coach is butchering significant moments in significant games repeatedly, how can I blindly stand by and offer support for his overall program? Either he gets it right or he gets the assistance he needs to get it right. Hiring a play-caller last spring wouldn’t have assured anyone that Bailey makes a kick. But, it would likely make many of us feel better that they did everything they could to increase their chances. A great coach sees short-comings on his team – even if it is in the mirror. Again, I am not trying to hang this around the neck of Jason Garrett. But, I sure wish he didn’t offer so many opportunities for the media to do just that.
Patience was beginning to run thin, as a team that finished 8-8 annually was seemingly giving away two wins per season. 10-6 might just be a matter of having a coach who understood these things.
No. 5 – December 30th, 2012 — at Washington
In this situation, with the NFC East on the line and playing against a team with a QB who had wrecked his knee and could hardly move, the Cowboys played one of their worst games of the era.
From that game’s Morning After:
Did you know the Cowboys had the ball in Washington territory on 8 of their first 9 possessions last night? 8 times on the Washington end of the field in their first 9 possessions (they only had 11 – the 10th possession was the interception to Jackson and the 11th possession was the garbage time sequence with 1 minute left) only resulted in 3 scores. 3 others ended in punts from plus territory and then, of course, the 2 interceptions that both ended drives early.
That is why this offensive performance must be positioned as nothing short of a failure. The job, in particular by Tony Romo – the man who is most responsible for the Cowboys being in this position to begin with – was just not nearly at the level it needed to be to win a tough divisional road game on the final night of the season. Romo, as I am sure you are well aware, picked a horrendous time for his 4th multi-interception game of 2012. In those 4 games, as you might imagine, the Cowboys were winless. The first 3 were home games against the Bears, Giants, and these same Redskins, but this one had all of the trimmings of a playoff game and the picks were all damaging and key. But, no interception of Romo’s career might hurt as much as the last one of 2012. For that was a pick that comes down to that moment that everyone dreams when they discuss the credentials of their favorite QB. They always ask the question, “can this guy get your team down the field on that one drive with everything on the line?”
And later that week,
Jason Garrett is a bright offensive mind, but I also believe that he has had more than enough time to sort this offense better than he has. You could make the case that he was sabotaged by a poor personnel offseason as it pertains to the offensive line, but 6 years is a long time. 6 years for a play-caller and a QB to work together is a very rare luxury in the NFL, generally afforded to iconic offenses that are clearly not broken so there is no need to fix them. This offense, on the other hand, is never confused for flawless, and looks more problematic every year, despite continuity at QB and near perfect health all season on the unit.
By the final whistle of 2012, I had enough of Jason Garrett. Sure, 40 games isn’t a long time for a head coach, but the true math added up to way more than that. It was 99 games in total from the time of his hire in 2007 working with Tony Romo and the offense. And here at the end of 2012, their partnership was almost as long as anyone in the industry who did not have a Super Bowl appearance. They still were losing winnable games and missing the playoffs. It made no sense. Enough time had passed. And there were enough examples.
This was the first time I thought Jason Garrett should have been fired. Not because of that one game and that one collapse, but because they were 16-16 in those two seasons with a fully fit Tony Romo, and at worst, they should have been 20-12 with two divisional titles and playoff berths. Underachieving at this level cannot go on and on.
This one was truly fireable. The Cowboys needed a new coach. They would not get one for seven more years.
No. 6 – December 15th, 2013 – Green Bay
They were playing a team with Matt Flynn at QB. An organization that had gone 1-4-1 since Aaron Rodgers had been injured. The Cowboys were up 26-3 at halftime in a game they had to win in Week 15 of a season after a four-year playoff drought. They played arguably the worst half of home football in the history of the franchise and lost to a backup QB and a team that had pretty much given up.
Surely, this was the last straw. Amazingly, it was not. The December 15 performance, on the heels of the Washington loss in 2012, demonstrated that perhaps nothing could get Jason Garrett fired. I wrote the next day.
Teams don’t blow leads of that magnitude very often – in fact, according to Scott Kacsmar, the NFL has only blown 3 home leads of this size since 1999. 3 times, of which the Cowboys have authored 2 of the 3 with Jason Garrett and Tony Romo at the helm. That’s right. The Cowboys have done it twice in the last 3 seasons with this loss and the home loss to Detroit back in 2011 (when they enjoyed a 27-3 lead early in the 3rd Quarter before ultimately losing).
Realizing that the margin for error in both of those seasons is a single win separating a divisional title from another season on the outside of the playoffs, those facts alone might be enough to get many coaches fired under the “fireable offenses” bylaws that circulate around professional football.
We can get to the discussion of how close the Jason Garrett era is to ending in the next 14 days where it will either be put to bed or it will happen, as I am now convinced that the next 2 weeks decide his job future 100%. This loss is unpardonable on the heels of the disaster in Chicago and considering the way this team has a history of playing just well enough to stay alive in the race until the end and just poor enough to spit the bit at the moment of truth.
They would not win out and they would miss the playoffs again. And it still didn’t matter. They did not fire Jason Garrett again. He would survive to coach six more years.
As you know, 2014 would really offer the false dawn of the Garrett era turning a corner. Surely, 2011-13 was simply a finishing school. After the great 2014 and the bad beat in the playoffs, the Jones family will be rewarded for patience and understanding that it sometimes takes a bit to figure things out. Heck, even I had started to second guess and confess that perhaps I had been too hasty. Maybe Jason Garrett was actually an elite NFL coach.
2015-19 would, unfortunately, refute that case. But despite all of these incidents in his first five seasons, he would receive another five years before the Cowboys would admit that he wasn’t the guy they hoped he was to return the franchise to the promised land. It was truly a lost decade.
Next time, we will detail the many wrong turns from the post-Tony Romo era.
