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Dallas Cowboys pre-training camp position breakdown series, looking at the coaching staff

July 19, 2024
NFL: Dallas Cowboys at San Francisco 49ers
Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

As we close our Dallas Cowboys Roster Breakdown Series... we need to take a close look at the coaching staff overseeing it all.

It is often said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I do not know many beholders who find there to be a ton of beauty within the Dallas Cowboys coaching staff.

Everywhere you look the consensus is that the Cowboys have a coaching issue. Questions about whether or not Mike McCarthy has to reach the NFC Championship Game in order to retain his job for next season are all over the place, Heavy is the head that wears the crown of America’s Team.

Full disclosure: I was among those ready to move on from McCarthy after the horrendous playoff exit that came at the hands of his former team. But objectively speaking it is amazing how little credit he gets for anything he is a part of.

Outside of getting about zero credit for winning the Super Bowl due to losing a public PR battle to Aaron Rodgers, consider how many Dallas Cowboys fans are fed up with quarterback Dak Prescott. There are plenty as we all well know.

The argument is that Dak weighs this team down, but this team has won more regular season games than 30 other teams over the last three years, a handful of them without the starting quarterback which McCarthy’s predecessor taught us was functionally impossible (reminder that Jason Garrett went 1-11 in 2015 without Tony Romo). The Cowboys have won 12 games and reached the postseason in each of their last three years. These are not feats worthy of a banner or parade, but they were completely foreign for the entirety of The Drought™️. McCarthy’s name shouldn’t hang in the Ring of Honor or anything, but there is no question that he has had the best run as head coach of this organization since the days when this team dominated the NFL.

Over the last few weeks we have been taking a look at the Cowboys roster in advance of training camp and breaking them down one by one. You can review any that you would like right below:

If it is not obvious the time has come to discuss the coaching staff, including the aforementioned Mike McCarthy.

Let’s begin.

Mike McCarthy

We used to lament how the Cowboys would only reach the playoffs every other year and how this afforded zero consistency in terms of opportunity for them to break through. Obviously zero appearances beyond the Divisional Round in four years is frustrating, but McCarthy is not responsible for the frustrations we felt with this franchise before he arrived.

Only the Kansas City Chiefs have won more regular season games than Mike McCarthy’s Cowboys over the last three years. The Chiefs obviously have two titles in that same span with the Los Angeles Rams holding the other. Two teams have won the Super Bowl in the period we are talking about here and one of them has a player that is on an all-time sort of path. These things do not make us feel better or make the situation better, but they are worth saying out loud with regards to context.

There are six total teams who have been to the playoffs in each of the last three years. Here they are ranked by the amount of playoff wins they have in that time period:

Obviously being last here is frustrating as well, but it is worth mentioning that two of the three losses that Dallas has incurred in this time period have come against the 49ers who are probably sick with grief looking at this list with no world championships to show for it.

Generally speaking the people associated with these teams, namely the head coaches, are regarded pretty highly in NFL conversations. Andy Reid and Kyle Shanahan are clearly the league’s best coaches and play-callers at the moment, and while Sean McDermott had a rough stretch last year he is still considered a top tier leader. Todd Bowles has certainly drawn his fair share of criticism, the only other coach here who receives a similar level of treatment to McCarthy is probably Nick Sirianni. Much of that is clearly about their markets.

What is clear as we enter a contract year for McCarthy is that someone else may be at the helm this time in 2025. But we should consider that things may not be as bad as we sometimes make them out to be relative to the head coach. He has done part of what he signed up to do, obviously we need to see the whole thing put together.

Also, while we are on talking about McCarthy and on the verge of getting to his offensive coordinator, consider the events of the last 450 days or so.

Following his most successful season in Dallas at the time (arguably still), McCarthy chose to move on from Kellen Moore as his play-caller, someone who had only ever had high levels of success in the field.

Moore floundered with the Los Angeles Chargers while the Cowboys soared under McCarthy. McCarthy got the best statistical season out of Prescott throughout the course of his career. He called his shot in that he believed he could improve the offense and you know what? He was right!

The nature of his position is so that McCarthy gets no real credit for this (Dak doesn’t get any either), but consider the improvements in the passing game that we saw on offense from 2022 to 2023 from a DVOA perspective:

  • 2022 Cowboys Offensive DVOA: 15.6% pass, -0.2% rush
  • 2023 Cowboys Offensive DVOA: 24.9% pass, -4.3% rush

Did the run game decline? Obviously. Tony Pollard clearly wasn’t the same player in 2023 than he was the year prior which was obviously a big reason why the team let him walk in free agency; however, McCarthy’s impact on the passing game was obvious. He deserves his props in whatever way you feel comfortable giving them to him.

Brian Schottenheimer

Much was made about the decision for McCarthy to promote Brian Schottenheimer to offensive coordinator last season, but as noted above, the results really do speak for themselves.

Obviously Schottenheimer is not the offensive play-caller so it is difficult to compare him to other OCs in that capacity, but the offense was a machine in 2023. Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb both experienced career years and clearly the week-to-week handlings overseen by Schottenheimer were of value.

Ultimately the offense is in the hands of McCarthy so Schottenheimer does not have to worry about lifting the heaviest load associated with the position, but it is difficult to feel like he did anything other than his job last year and that he did it excellently.

We have been dropping videos breaking down position groups on the Dallas Cowboys roster every Tuesday and Thursday for the last few weeks as we have gotten closer and closer to training camp. Make sure to subscribe to the Blogging The Boys YouTube Channel (which you can do right here) so you do not miss any of them.

Mike Zimmer

You can count me among those who remains skeptical of this decision.

Mike Zimmer possesses a bit more of what we will call an “attitude” as far as how he interacts with his players, and that odds are he will instill a larger sense of accountability to the defense. That passes the smell test.

While I was ready for the team to move on from Dan Quinn this felt like a really flat alternative. The only other candidates who were reported in a serious fashion alongside Zimmer for the open DC position were Ron Rivera and Rex Ryan. That hardly felt like looking under each and every stone of opportunity.

With that qualifier out of the way, it goes without saying that a lot of what does or does not happen this season is going to be because of the Zimmer decision. Can he return the defense to one of having a bit of a spine on top of the flare that we have seen? An inability to stop the run is a big reason why the Cowboys have the fewest playoff wins in the list referenced under McCarthy’s discussion, and they have been clamoring to fix that for over a thousand days now.

Training camp is about to teach us a lot about Zimmer The Cowboy 2.0... here we go.

Al Harris

For the most part this discussion is about the head coach and coordinators on the Cowboys, but it felt improper to leave off Al Harris given what he has done over the last few years.

Given a promotion this offseason after Dan Quinn tried to take him on his journey to Washington, Harris has overseen the league’s top two ballhawks over the last three years. In that time period Trevon Diggs has the most interceptions in the NFL and DaRon Bland is tied for the second-most, and that is with each of them having basically missed an entire year within the span (Diggs due to injury, Bland due to only being drafted in 2022).

If there is a future head coach on this staff there is no question that it is Al Harris. He has the success as a coach now to pair with what he did as a player to parlay into the perfect package that teams love to bring in when they are in the middle of an overhaul. Everything he has touched has turned to gold and our newfound faith in the secondary as a whole is a big representation of that.

John Fassel

One other coach of note who has been in Dallas throughout the Mike McCarthy era is special teams coordinator John Fassel. He remains elite at his job.

If we are being honest with ourselves the early days of Fassel were quite, um, interesting. His high level of aggression often felt misplaced but in the years since he has seemingly found the right way to balance it out with everything else involved. Ever the interesting character, Fassel’s knack for smelling out the right and proper moment has catapulted the Cowboys’ special teams from a group we simply tolerated to one that swings games.

As we noted when we discussed his specialists, his impact this year is likely most going to be felt in the league’s new kickoff. Recall that Fassel was among the group that pitched the new rule to the owners who ultimately voted to approve it. If there is anyone who held the original keys to cracking the code it is him. He is the maddest of mad scientists in that sense.


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