Being a Dallas Cowboys fan has felt for years, if not decades, like watching an odd episode of Star Trek, where the crew is trying frantically to find a way to change the events, but they just keep happening over and over. Like the team, we too feel confined. We raise our expectations each year, just to see them shattered once more.
The reason I included the word “purgatory” in the title is that Dallas has never fully collapsed. Even if they stumble and have a terrible season, they usually recover more than that and at least return to mediocrity the following year. They are in the running for the playoffs most years, and they have qualified for the postseason six of the past 10 times, but they have failed to advance. Those have turned into amazing crash-and-burns of late. However, they continue to win the division or receive a wild card bid. The Cowboys are predictable softies in hard times, but they are never irrelevant.
Most years, they also profit from having opponents in the weaker division. They defeat their inferior opponents annually, which accounts for a big percentage of their victories. The Washington Commanders, in all of their iterations, and the New York Giants have been record-setting easy winners for a number of years.
This is due to a few factors. Jerry Jones appears to have a talent for selecting head coaches who are competent but insufficiently skilled. Before being fired, Dave Campo guided the team to three straight 5-11 seasons. He was the last poor head coach the team had. To be fair, he wasn’t exactly blessed with great talent either. Since then, all four head coaches have had winning records and at least a pair of postseason trips; Mike McCarthy has been the most consistent, having had three straight seasons with twelve wins or more. The majority of teams fire their coaches following one or more disappointing seasons. Nevertheless, it becomes more difficult to defend their actions as the team continues to win until they collapse in the postseason.
There appears to be a talent component as well. Dallas is known for performing well in the draft; nevertheless, 2023 stands out as an anomaly. They consistently have talented players, but they just can’t manage to overcome the setback of having one or more roster holes that ultimately cause them to lose in the postseason. In contrast to the excellent work Will McClay and associates do in selecting and identifying UDFA prospects, the team has given up on the top end of the free agency market entirely since the ill-fated attempt to sign Brandon Carr in 2012 with an offer of $50 million, a huge contract. That happened at the same time that Stephen Jones rose to prominence as the Cowboys’ go-to guy for contracts.
Jerry Jones has an overblown reputation as a meddling coach, but he does have a say in several important assistant selections. Perhaps his most well-known intervention was when he insisted that McCarthy keep Kellen Moore as his offensive coordinator after McCarthy was hired. McCarthy obediently declared that he agreed with the judgment in full, but it sounds far more like a good soldier than an accurate statement. This simply seems to be a blow to his head coaches. Though McCarthy, like Garrett before him, appeared to bounce back after a few seasons, one cannot help but wonder if the course of events could have been slightly different if McCarthy had continued to call plays during his first three years.
