Comparing Cowboys Brian Schottenheimer to other new 2025-26 HCs
Following the Dallas Cowboys Week 3 loss in Brazil against the Baltimore Ravens, we said it was going to be a long week for head coach Brian Schottenheimer after his team snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in that international game. It was a long week indeed, but at least the Cowboys weren’t actually favorites to beat the Ravens, plus they followed it up with a bounce back win at the Houston Texans where Schotty cooked up a second half comeback led by his offense.
Thursday night at home against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers changed all of this, sending the Cowboys and their head man into an even longer week, in more ways than just literally as the Cowboys will have 12 days in between this loss and their next game at the Green Bay Packers.
The extra time will just be even more of an opportunity to question the leadership of this team, coaching and players. Unlike the Ravens game, the Cowboys were favorites, by a lot, to beat the Buccaneers, and instead lost to an undrafted rookie quarterback and had no answers for the Todd Bowles defense.
Cowboys fans got the familiar speech from Jerry Jones last season when Schottenheimer was hired that he’s willing to live with inexperience with coaches in order to see them learn from mistakes and develop. Here at the start of year two (a start with a very “it’s getting late early” vibe to it) under Schottenheimer though, there’s been much more talk about the team willing to do what it takes to win.
Instead, they’re seeing Schotty still look inexperienced, under-prepared, and unmotivating. The new and inexperienced play-calling coach is supposed to be defensive coordinator Christian Parker, and the Cowboys are certainly paying a cost on that side of the ball through his learning process as well.
Throw in special teams coordinator Nick Sorensen not having the third phase of the game playing well either, and it’s far too much to overcome when the Cowboys are bad in all three phases at different times throughout every single game.
Even with all this doom and gloom, the Cowboys can’t just pack up shop and call it quits on a 2026 season where they sit at 2-3. The NFC East is still there for the taking, only two teams league-wide are still undefeated with four wins, and the Cowboys have some significant injuries that aren’t season-ending.
One way to look at the bigger picture of where this Cowboys team is at right now though is to look at their progression under Schottenheimer compared to the other new head coaches from the 2025 cycle he was a part of, as well as this year’s class.
The new head coaches in the league last year beside Schottenheimer were Ben Johnson with the Chicago Bears, Mike Vrabel with the New England Patriots, Aaron Glenn with the New York Jets, Liam Coen with the Jacksonville Jaguars, Pete Carroll with the Las Vegas Raiders, and Kellen Moore with the New Orleans Saints. Johnson, Glenn, Coen, and Moore all carried the tag of being first-time head coaches in this cycle, while Vrabel and Carroll had, of course, been head coaches before, se we’ll leave both of them out of the comparison. All but Carroll are still in place with the same teams.
Ben Johnson
Johnson is possibly the best game-planning head coach on offense in the league right now, thinking of diabolical ways to toy with defenses the second he arrived in Chicago from the Detroit Lions. Lions fans would even be the first to tell anyone that would listen that losing Johnson as offensive coordinator was going to sink their team’s status as a true contender, even though they kept Dan Campbell as head coach. It’s funny how no other team ever even considered this of Schottenheimer who was offensive coordinator for the 12-5 Cowboys in 2023 under Mike McCarthy, and again OC in 2024.
One win in Johnson’s head coaching debut season came against that dreadful Matt Eberflus defense, as the Bears beat the Cowboys in week three. That win was actually Johnson’s first after an 0-2 start, and it started a stretch where the Bears would win nine of ten through November. The Bears won the NFC North and beat their division rival the Packers in the Wild Card round, before losing by three to the LA Rams in the Divisional game.
The Bears currently sit at 3-1 with a 59-point performance in week one, and 20-point win on primetime over the Philadelphia Eagles with Case Keenum starting for Caleb Williams.
Kellen Moore
Enough on that since it was always a pipe dream the Cowboys would hire Ben Johnson, so let’s stay in the NFC and look at the head coach that Schottenheimer replaced as offensive coordinator in Dallas when he got hired in 2023. Kellen Moore’s first head coaching gig with the Saints saw him go 6-11. After an 0-4 start that fell to 1-8 by week nine, the Saints won four straight in December to give them something to feel good about going into the offseason.
The carryover effect saw the Saints lose by one in overtime in week one after Moore went aggressive to play for the win on a two-point conversion, then respond to beat the Ravens on the road in week two. At this exact moment the Saints are in a tough spot having lost two straight after that win to the Las Vegas Raiders and Atlanta Falcons, but the battery of Moore and QB Tyler Shough is still trending in the right direction and has that franchise excited about their young talent as a whole on both sides of the ball.
Liam Coen
Liam Coen, a longtime offensive coach that had quite the wait to get his first head coaching shot, got immediate results with a 13-4 record in year one. The Jaguars hadn’t won 13 games since 1999. No waiting around for Coen to learn on the job was necessary, apparently.
They’re currently 3-1 with their only loss being of one-score variety at the Denver Broncos. Most recently, they held the Cincinnati Bengals to 17 points in their own stadium to get a 22-17 win, and the Jaguars look like real AFC contenders at the moment with Trevor Lawrence at QB.
Aaron Glenn
That leaves only Aaron Glenn with the Jets, the only other coach on this 2025 list that Schottenheimer coached against directly in his debut season as well. The Cowboys rolled to victory against a Jets team that was hapless under Glenn last year, but already have shown a few more signs of life in year two of his program. It’s always baby steps when talking about the Jets and positivity, but they opened the season with a win and then had real chances to take games against the Packers and Lions the next two weeks to be 3-0 instead of now 1-3, also losing to the Bears in week four.
If this means that Schottenheimer is only clearly better than Glenn as the Jets head coach, it’s fair to say that’s not exactly what the Cowboys hired him for. This picture of the Cowboys falling behind in a crucial way yet again doesn’t get much prettier when looking at the 2026 head coaches that are new this season either.
2026 new head coaches
They are Joe Brady with the Bills, Jesse Minter with the Ravens, Mike LaFleur with the Arizona Cardinals, Klint Kubiak with the Raiders, Todd Monken with the Cleveland Browns, Jeff Hafley with the Miami Dolphins, and John Harbaugh with the New York Giants. Only Harbaugh goes in the “previous head coaching experience” bucket here.
We started this post talking about Minter’s win against the Cowboys already, and who could forget former Ravens coach John Harbaugh beating the Cowboys in week one with the Giants too. The Raiders were 3-0 before a close loss to their rival Kansas City Chiefs last Sunday under Kubiak.
Brady has Josh Allen playing at his usual MVP level for the Bills, and Monken is also getting the best QB play the Browns have had in some time out of Deshaun Watson. The energy around the Browns is entirely different under Monken right now, and you don’t hear an endless stream of buzzwords to hide behind out a team not even expected to have a winning standard for some time.
The Cowboys always find a way to prove this wrong, but the organization is running out of stones to leave unturned when it comes to finding the source of why they always lag behind and don’t look like a team ready to make any real noise.
There’s the man hiring the coaches in Jerry Jones, and then there’s the coaching itself. Right now isn’t the time or place to have the tired “Jerry needs to go” discussion, so the focus is on coaching directly.
The Cowboys are not well coached compared to other teams that have taken the same risks to get new coaches in their buildings, and not talented or poised enough to overcome bad coaching either. The other constant that’s been here and won’t avoid criticism this week for both his play against the Bucs nor postgame comments to the media is Dak Prescott, who fans also accept at other times is the only reason Dallas has a chance to fight for a winning record most seasons.
The one thing we said as fans when the team moved on from Jason Garrett to Mike McCarthy was that it took Jerry half as much time to realize that McCarthy wasn’t the right fit anymore compared to how long it took for Garrett. With how hot coach Schottenheimer’s seat already feels in year two, halving this time again would mean two and a half years on the job if he doesn’t turn things around quickly.
And since the Cowboys are pretty adverse to in-season coaching changes of this magnitude, rounding down to two would mean this season could be the end of the Schotty experiment. One way or another, these 2026 Cowboys still have a lot to play for.
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