Thankfully, the last time I checked, Sports Illustrated wasn’t owned by Jerry Jones, so he can’t threaten to fire me for suggesting that he do something about the expensive rubble heap he’s created in Dallas. Although, if I suddenly disappear, consider this an important breadcrumb as to my whereabouts.
We found out Monday that Dak Prescott is out for a long(ish) period of time with a hamstring injury. And while the tandem of Mike McCarthy and Cooper Rush has done yeoman’s work in the past when trying to keep the Dallas Cowboys alive sans Prescott, this is almost certainly the death knell for a 3–5 team in a season that was doomed before it started. In fact, Prescott’s injury is probably the one aspect of this tailspin that is out of the owner’s control. The rest—allowing a lame-duck staff to take the field with no real help from free agency, which ultimately led to a culture of indifference and defeatism—falls squarely under his purview.
One underrated and especially devastating aspect of Jones’s decision-making process is that he allowed McCarthy to remain in a position in which he would pour no more resources. Instead of simply promoting former defensive coordinator Dan Quinn, who now leads the best and most exciting team in the division, having completely turned around the franchise in a matter of months, Jones decided to double down on his indifference. He encouraged Quinn to go to Washington—Quinn told me at the beginning of the season that Jones was happy Quinn was going to turn around the football-starved city—and replaced Quinn with a coordinator who would essentially accept a one-year deal (for reference, standard coordinator deals started climbing to three-year contracts around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic). To be clear, filtering your search criteria based on someone’s willingness to take a job just to get back into the rotation severely impacts your ability to hire the best candidate.
From Dallas’s current predicament, we can extrapolate a few soon-to-be facts that, if not already apparent, will soon become as much.
• The Cowboys will hire a new head coach in 2025.
• The Cowboys will be selecting the highest they have picked in the draft since 2021 and possibly since ’16
This is what makes 2025 Jones’s most critical offseason in modern franchise history. It’s not hyperbolic to suggest that the Cowboys need a foundational draft class to replenish an aging defense and offensive line, as well as to add additional playmakers to the offense. He also needs to earmark funding for a historic Micah Parsons contract, and pair Parsons with a dynamic defensive coordinator to unlock him in a similar way that Quinn did. Of course, nailing the head coaching hire is the umbrella under which all these other to-do items fall. And, if Jones wants a quarterback-centric coach capable of also bringing in a home-run-hitting coordinator, he’s probably going to have to pay about twice as much as he did for McCarthy in the first place and ensure that he is willing to provide the resources that McCarthy did not get toward the end of his tenure.
Jones went from Jason Garrett, a coach who was already on staff, to McCarthy in an effort to quickly turn an upper-middle-class roster into a full blown Super Bowl contender. McCarthy went 12–5 in each of the past three seasons but was siphoned into this lame-duck year, which, as we mentioned, set into motion a comically predictable series of events. Jones telling reporters on Sunday, after another aimless loss to the Atlanta Falcons, that the team would look to add at the trade deadline was more depressing than it was inspiring, given that there really isn’t anything that can save Dallas at this point.
And so, the question becomes: How can Jones make the Cowboys’ job look appealing again? And, does he still have the desire to invest on the football side beyond handsomely paying a few stars that he can slap on a billboard like they’re the new-age triplets? And, can he communicate that amid a crowded head coaching market that already has two other vacancies (the New York Jets and New Orleans Saints) and will likely balloon far beyond that the closer we get to season’s end?
Watching the Saints fire Dennis Allen on Monday was a reminder of how a few years of stagnancy can torpedo a franchise with complicated financials. While the Saints are historic for their tangled salary cap situation, Dallas has also suffered a bit from a desire to win in the moment and defer the inevitable hardships. Allen was viewed as a kind of parallel maneuver from Sean Payton after Payton left the organization high and dry, but that attempt at the status quo has sunken the Saints into a position where they are one of the least desirable head coach openings I can remember. They will either need to offer market-leading compensation or an outlier deal in terms of contract length to secure one of the top candidates available.
Dallas is one bad hire and one irresponsible offseason away from finding itself in a similar position. The biomarkers are there, even if the core of Dallas’s roster is slightly younger and still has a bit of upward trajectory.
Jones is wonderfully adept at making it seem like he has a plan and, certainly, we will start to see its machinations now that the wheels are coming off the current iteration. His last big decision failed to adequately capitalize on the simultaneous primes of three of the league’s best individual position players (Prescott, Parsons and CeeDee Lamb). His next one must, all at once, correct the apathy that has led his starting quarterback to mouth freely on the sideline that “we f------ suck,” immediately turn the Cowboys into a competitive franchise again as Jayden Daniels prepares to lord over this division, and safely navigate the team’s financial situation by drafting, developing and inspiring affordable young talent to backfill this roster.
He cannot and will not fire himself. Instead, he must find the kind of people who can remain one step ahead of his worst impulses. The kind that have rendered the Cowboys rudderless and meaningless at the tail end of the 2024 season.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jerry Jones Needs to Ace the 2025 Offseason to Save the Cowboys.
