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By Bob Sturm 32m ago
The NFL has made documentaries on many topics over the years, many of which have uncovered a reality we were unaware of about how things go behind the scenes. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, one particular topic remains relatively undocumented: the wild race at the end of each season for all of the hundreds of aspiring coaches to find spots in the league before the final positions are filled. In order to work your way up the coaching ladder, you first need a spot on the ladder.
Sign me up to watch how it actually works behind the scenes. It must be amazing, but it is still not something that is discussed.
Most NFL assistant coaches are on one-year deals, although that number is starting to change as we hear more and more about second or sometimes even third years being given to sweeten a deal for one organization to land a highly regarded wide receiver coach, or a linebacker coach who has some real promise. The deals are obviously voidable if the coaches get a substantial promotion elsewhere — as in a coordinator spot — but otherwise, they may be able to avoid “silly season” if they get those rare multi-year pacts. Of course, the easiest way to avoid it is to have the full support and blessing of your current head coach and for him to have enough success to get invited back. If you play those cards correctly, perhaps you are someone like longtime Cowboys RB coach Gary Brown, who just completed his seventh consecutive season under Jason Garrett. Positional coaches can have long runs in one stop, of course, but take a quick look at the biographical information on a coach’s profile page and you will see that few humans change addresses as often as football coaches.
This is the way. They make connections by being great at their job and personable enough to be thought of as thorough, loyal men ready to fight for a new cause. Then they network enough to have options where former work colleagues might need to build a staff and provide the inside chance because of that previous working arrangement. If the NFL doesn’t call, perhaps there is something in the college ranks. Who knows, but coaches have to coach.
It must be particularly trying from that perspective of trying to land another spot for next season after an entire staff was not invited back wherever they might have been.
Someday, someone needs to put that journey on film so we can understand the realities of this “dream job,” and what is truly at stake when a team has a horrendous season.
Mike McCarthy is, of course, long removed from the group agonizing over college tuition money. He has made tens of millions of dollars, and we suspect he has just signed a deal that will put him in even another stratosphere. After replacing Jason Garrett, who was on a five-year, $30 million deal, it is safe to assume McCarthy is closer to five years and $40 million or so, although those facts have yet to emerge.
But he knows, as all coaches do, that they are often only as good as the coaching staff they can assemble, and given his long presentation on what he wishes to build here in Dallas, it is now vital for him to assemble his staff as well as possible so he can actually do that job. I would argue there are few coaches who can match the number of connections he has built going back almost three full decades in this sport, so his spiderweb of relationships likely reaches far.
Without question, though, the best news is that he clearly gets to utilize that web.
We’ve seen numerous Dallas head coaches inherit a staff. We have been talking about this for a long time because it is the recipe for disaster, but the extent of the issue never seemed to dawn on the front office. Jason Garrett took over much of Wade Phillips’ staff. Now there is a real chance that Garrett was fine with that because he needed a staff to be assembled quickly, too, but it also sets up issues — not the least of which is that there are often guys on the staff who wonder why the owner didn’t pick him to succeed the fired coach as the next guy. This presents massive issues of loyalty and undercutting that could emerge and often do when a crisis invariably hits town.
Garrett was even brought in under similar circumstances in 2007. At the time, Jerry Jones desperately wanted him, but the decision was made that he probably wasn’t ready to take over for Bill Parcells as head coach. So, before Jones could find a head coach, he hired the offensive coordinator underneath him. The new coach would agree to allow his most important assistant to be hired first and a clear message to be sent to all about which was more vital to the entire operation. Certainly, that causes a political game to surface when a crisis hits.
And it did. By 2008, there was a massive locker-room rift between WR coach Ray Sherman’s guys and Jason Garrett’s guys on the offense. Surely, Terrell Owens being around helped the receivers room stoke the feelings that “Romo and Witten are drawing up plays by themselves.” The “Keepin’ it Real Thursdays” tradition spilled out into the media as the Cowboys 2008 season circled the drain. That was probably the season in which the Cowboys underachieved most in recent history until 2019.
A coaching staff needs one message and one purpose. The positional coaches have to actually believe in the coordinators. The coordinators have to want the head coach to be successful. I know this seems obvious, but coordinators can often start thinking about how likely they would be the next coach if this head coach finally got fired. Positional assistants can start undercutting the coordinators in meetings on their way up. Loyalty is mandatory, or the message from the top gets lost and suddenly a locker room becomes dozens of personal agendas as everyone looks for a life raft.
If Barry Switzer’s entire staff is made up of Jimmy Johnson loyalists, and if Switzer’s staff becomes Gailey’s staff and then Campo’s staff, well, you can see the issue here. They begin to understand that Jerry Jones, not their head coach, is the boss. In time, the head coach becomes a figurehead that nobody in the organization actually respects as the guy who can get them hired or fired. And do you know why? Because he can’t get them fired — or at least not very easily.
If assistants don’t fear the head coach, then you can imagine over time how that message goes to the players, too. Before long, the meetings that players in other cities would schedule with the head coach to talk about their issues or futures often might go right to the Jones family again.
As you read this, it may occur to you that this has been the way it is for 25 years or so. What is the big deal? The deal is it isn’t the way NFL power structures are supposed to work. I also think it is important to understand that with most franchises, the head coach is where all communications in the football department end. There are no end-around lines of communication to the GM or the owner from 95 percent of players. If they have an issue, you need to talk to Coach. Sure, Tom Brady can get to Robert Kraft, but how many Patriots players have earned that right? In Oakland or Chicago or Buffalo, if you need to talk about something, schedule a meeting with Coach.
You either have one organizational agenda, or you have way too many. And it appears the only way Mike McCarthy would take this job was if he had a say over his entire staff. This was the arrangement with Bill Parcells. Sure, he can keep holdovers, but it will only be after a direct meeting when he finds out how interested Mike Zimmer would be in staying on and pledging allegiance to the cause. If that will be an issue, we will go get someone who understands this is a new day around here.
Everything is rosy right now in Cowboys Land. They have a new beginning, and there is fresh air blowing through the facility. But every coach in the history of the sport only truly finds out who has his back when the trouble hits. That is when they are either in the foxhole or they are running to the owner to undercut the boss and work their way up the ladder themselves. This is why naming your own staff is the only way to run a proper program and have everyone with a star on their shirt understanding who is in charge of this thing. That premise could be cemented, of course, with a press conference where McCarthy is alone on the podium, but I realize I am asking for too much.
So far, the Cowboys appear to have deals in place with new defensive coordinator Mike Nolan (McCarthy’s old boss in San Francisco), defensive line coach Jim Tomsula (Nolan’s old assistant), offensive line coach Joe Philbin (McCarthy’s longtime offensive coordinator and actually the man who took over as interim coach when Mike was fired in December of 2018) and special teams coach John Fassel (who appears to have no real links to the coach in the past other than being really great at coaching special teams). These men will join Kellen Moore, whom we believe will stay on at offensive coordinator and continue his education under one of the brightest offensive minds and QB teachers in the sport today.
The rest seems far more speculative, as we hear names suggested or rumored only to see them take a job elsewhere. The old names on the Cowboys staff are a combination of coaches being interviewed to stay or those who have already been told their jobs have already been filled and they should seek a position elsewhere. Guts are surely churning, as many good coaches must relocate their families yet again. That is the nature of this beast.
But the mad scramble continues. McCarthy and his growing group will continue to find names to fill out the entire coaching staff. The front office stands by to try to agree to terms with each individual situation as many other organizations are simultaneously doing the same and often with the same candidates, which can result in some bidding wars. Again, it must be great theater, but it is largely out of view of the rest of the world.
From there, the new Cowboys coaching staff will get in a room for days and evaluate what they are taking over. They will study the current roster and give a fresh set of eyes to every corner of the team. This will offer new opinions, of course, which means much of what we know about “what the Cowboys think” is going to change quite a bit.
I have been asked plenty about schemes and alterations and what this man being hired will show on the field, and I will tell you that much of that is to be determined. McCarthy and Nolan both certainly have track records, but they also have been around long enough to know they aren’t married to particular concepts as much as they are obligated to see what they have to work with here and then prescribe what makes the most sense to get the optimal results as soon as possible. What I mean is that scheme applications must always consider the inherited talent, and this is where idealistic meets realistic. A coach or a coaching staff can always have preferred schemes, but they also know that they do not have a fresh wall to begin a painting. No, they must take over the project that Jason Garrett’s crew was building and make something grander out of it. This takes careful planning and evaluation.
That is a long way of saying I don’t believe they have made many decisions yet. They have ideas and visions, but they will proceed with caution — but they also must do it quickly as the calendar keeps turning. Soon, they will be in Mobile at the Senior Bowl, but by then they will need to have a full group. Also by then, they will have communicated to the scouting department what their initial and ever-changing shopping list needs to look like for this upcoming draft.
In the days to come, we will begin sorting through those countless issues and questions. It will surely keep us busy for months. But, for now, they are working the phones all across the football world and making certain they have the coaching staff in place that can pull all of this off.
The NFL has made documentaries on many topics over the years, many of which have uncovered a reality we were unaware of about how things go behind the scenes. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, one particular topic remains relatively undocumented: the wild race at the end of each season for all of the hundreds of aspiring coaches to find spots in the league before the final positions are filled. In order to work your way up the coaching ladder, you first need a spot on the ladder.
Sign me up to watch how it actually works behind the scenes. It must be amazing, but it is still not something that is discussed.
Most NFL assistant coaches are on one-year deals, although that number is starting to change as we hear more and more about second or sometimes even third years being given to sweeten a deal for one organization to land a highly regarded wide receiver coach, or a linebacker coach who has some real promise. The deals are obviously voidable if the coaches get a substantial promotion elsewhere — as in a coordinator spot — but otherwise, they may be able to avoid “silly season” if they get those rare multi-year pacts. Of course, the easiest way to avoid it is to have the full support and blessing of your current head coach and for him to have enough success to get invited back. If you play those cards correctly, perhaps you are someone like longtime Cowboys RB coach Gary Brown, who just completed his seventh consecutive season under Jason Garrett. Positional coaches can have long runs in one stop, of course, but take a quick look at the biographical information on a coach’s profile page and you will see that few humans change addresses as often as football coaches.
This is the way. They make connections by being great at their job and personable enough to be thought of as thorough, loyal men ready to fight for a new cause. Then they network enough to have options where former work colleagues might need to build a staff and provide the inside chance because of that previous working arrangement. If the NFL doesn’t call, perhaps there is something in the college ranks. Who knows, but coaches have to coach.
It must be particularly trying from that perspective of trying to land another spot for next season after an entire staff was not invited back wherever they might have been.
Someday, someone needs to put that journey on film so we can understand the realities of this “dream job,” and what is truly at stake when a team has a horrendous season.
Mike McCarthy is, of course, long removed from the group agonizing over college tuition money. He has made tens of millions of dollars, and we suspect he has just signed a deal that will put him in even another stratosphere. After replacing Jason Garrett, who was on a five-year, $30 million deal, it is safe to assume McCarthy is closer to five years and $40 million or so, although those facts have yet to emerge.
But he knows, as all coaches do, that they are often only as good as the coaching staff they can assemble, and given his long presentation on what he wishes to build here in Dallas, it is now vital for him to assemble his staff as well as possible so he can actually do that job. I would argue there are few coaches who can match the number of connections he has built going back almost three full decades in this sport, so his spiderweb of relationships likely reaches far.
Without question, though, the best news is that he clearly gets to utilize that web.
We’ve seen numerous Dallas head coaches inherit a staff. We have been talking about this for a long time because it is the recipe for disaster, but the extent of the issue never seemed to dawn on the front office. Jason Garrett took over much of Wade Phillips’ staff. Now there is a real chance that Garrett was fine with that because he needed a staff to be assembled quickly, too, but it also sets up issues — not the least of which is that there are often guys on the staff who wonder why the owner didn’t pick him to succeed the fired coach as the next guy. This presents massive issues of loyalty and undercutting that could emerge and often do when a crisis invariably hits town.
Garrett was even brought in under similar circumstances in 2007. At the time, Jerry Jones desperately wanted him, but the decision was made that he probably wasn’t ready to take over for Bill Parcells as head coach. So, before Jones could find a head coach, he hired the offensive coordinator underneath him. The new coach would agree to allow his most important assistant to be hired first and a clear message to be sent to all about which was more vital to the entire operation. Certainly, that causes a political game to surface when a crisis hits.
And it did. By 2008, there was a massive locker-room rift between WR coach Ray Sherman’s guys and Jason Garrett’s guys on the offense. Surely, Terrell Owens being around helped the receivers room stoke the feelings that “Romo and Witten are drawing up plays by themselves.” The “Keepin’ it Real Thursdays” tradition spilled out into the media as the Cowboys 2008 season circled the drain. That was probably the season in which the Cowboys underachieved most in recent history until 2019.
A coaching staff needs one message and one purpose. The positional coaches have to actually believe in the coordinators. The coordinators have to want the head coach to be successful. I know this seems obvious, but coordinators can often start thinking about how likely they would be the next coach if this head coach finally got fired. Positional assistants can start undercutting the coordinators in meetings on their way up. Loyalty is mandatory, or the message from the top gets lost and suddenly a locker room becomes dozens of personal agendas as everyone looks for a life raft.
If Barry Switzer’s entire staff is made up of Jimmy Johnson loyalists, and if Switzer’s staff becomes Gailey’s staff and then Campo’s staff, well, you can see the issue here. They begin to understand that Jerry Jones, not their head coach, is the boss. In time, the head coach becomes a figurehead that nobody in the organization actually respects as the guy who can get them hired or fired. And do you know why? Because he can’t get them fired — or at least not very easily.
If assistants don’t fear the head coach, then you can imagine over time how that message goes to the players, too. Before long, the meetings that players in other cities would schedule with the head coach to talk about their issues or futures often might go right to the Jones family again.
As you read this, it may occur to you that this has been the way it is for 25 years or so. What is the big deal? The deal is it isn’t the way NFL power structures are supposed to work. I also think it is important to understand that with most franchises, the head coach is where all communications in the football department end. There are no end-around lines of communication to the GM or the owner from 95 percent of players. If they have an issue, you need to talk to Coach. Sure, Tom Brady can get to Robert Kraft, but how many Patriots players have earned that right? In Oakland or Chicago or Buffalo, if you need to talk about something, schedule a meeting with Coach.
You either have one organizational agenda, or you have way too many. And it appears the only way Mike McCarthy would take this job was if he had a say over his entire staff. This was the arrangement with Bill Parcells. Sure, he can keep holdovers, but it will only be after a direct meeting when he finds out how interested Mike Zimmer would be in staying on and pledging allegiance to the cause. If that will be an issue, we will go get someone who understands this is a new day around here.
Everything is rosy right now in Cowboys Land. They have a new beginning, and there is fresh air blowing through the facility. But every coach in the history of the sport only truly finds out who has his back when the trouble hits. That is when they are either in the foxhole or they are running to the owner to undercut the boss and work their way up the ladder themselves. This is why naming your own staff is the only way to run a proper program and have everyone with a star on their shirt understanding who is in charge of this thing. That premise could be cemented, of course, with a press conference where McCarthy is alone on the podium, but I realize I am asking for too much.
So far, the Cowboys appear to have deals in place with new defensive coordinator Mike Nolan (McCarthy’s old boss in San Francisco), defensive line coach Jim Tomsula (Nolan’s old assistant), offensive line coach Joe Philbin (McCarthy’s longtime offensive coordinator and actually the man who took over as interim coach when Mike was fired in December of 2018) and special teams coach John Fassel (who appears to have no real links to the coach in the past other than being really great at coaching special teams). These men will join Kellen Moore, whom we believe will stay on at offensive coordinator and continue his education under one of the brightest offensive minds and QB teachers in the sport today.
The rest seems far more speculative, as we hear names suggested or rumored only to see them take a job elsewhere. The old names on the Cowboys staff are a combination of coaches being interviewed to stay or those who have already been told their jobs have already been filled and they should seek a position elsewhere. Guts are surely churning, as many good coaches must relocate their families yet again. That is the nature of this beast.
But the mad scramble continues. McCarthy and his growing group will continue to find names to fill out the entire coaching staff. The front office stands by to try to agree to terms with each individual situation as many other organizations are simultaneously doing the same and often with the same candidates, which can result in some bidding wars. Again, it must be great theater, but it is largely out of view of the rest of the world.
From there, the new Cowboys coaching staff will get in a room for days and evaluate what they are taking over. They will study the current roster and give a fresh set of eyes to every corner of the team. This will offer new opinions, of course, which means much of what we know about “what the Cowboys think” is going to change quite a bit.
I have been asked plenty about schemes and alterations and what this man being hired will show on the field, and I will tell you that much of that is to be determined. McCarthy and Nolan both certainly have track records, but they also have been around long enough to know they aren’t married to particular concepts as much as they are obligated to see what they have to work with here and then prescribe what makes the most sense to get the optimal results as soon as possible. What I mean is that scheme applications must always consider the inherited talent, and this is where idealistic meets realistic. A coach or a coaching staff can always have preferred schemes, but they also know that they do not have a fresh wall to begin a painting. No, they must take over the project that Jason Garrett’s crew was building and make something grander out of it. This takes careful planning and evaluation.
That is a long way of saying I don’t believe they have made many decisions yet. They have ideas and visions, but they will proceed with caution — but they also must do it quickly as the calendar keeps turning. Soon, they will be in Mobile at the Senior Bowl, but by then they will need to have a full group. Also by then, they will have communicated to the scouting department what their initial and ever-changing shopping list needs to look like for this upcoming draft.
In the days to come, we will begin sorting through those countless issues and questions. It will surely keep us busy for months. But, for now, they are working the phones all across the football world and making certain they have the coaching staff in place that can pull all of this off.
