Watching the Dallas Cowboys in 2026 has become a tiring experience. We are not even halfway through the season, and things are already looking bleak. Losing is never fun, but watching them underachieve has become a weekly ordeal that has turned into pure exhaustion.
Every Sunday, it’s a new level of disappointment. There’s talent on this team, but the leadership and tactical execution have brought about regular failures that are tough to sit through. The most recent collapse against the Arizona Cardinals
serves as more evidence that head coach and play-caller Brian Schottenheimer is fundamentally not the guy to help this franchise return to glory.
The issues start with Schottenheimer’s bizarre tendencies. He routinely fails to make the basic decisions that would maximize his team’s probability of winning. One example is his weird habit of running quarterback sneaks down at his own goal line. Instead of trusting his playmakers or scheming an effective play, he plays scared and chooses to waste a down, putting the offense in a tough spot. Every time he does this, the Cowboys have punted three plays later.
Another example is his treatment of Brandon Aubrey. We all know that Aubrey is one of the league’s most lethal kicking weapons, but Schottenheimer finds ways to turn that into a disadvantage for the Cowboys.
Rather than pressing and trying to pick up extra yards to give him a more reasonable field goal attempt, the head coach contentedly runs the ball and settles for a short gain. His confidence in Aubrey treats those situations like an automatic three points instead of working for a shorter attempt. He unnecessarily creates high-stress kicking situations that have resulted in blocks and misses.
The team also cannot stop repeating the same mistakes. They look uncoached at times, committing the same self-inflicted errors week after week. Are we sick of neutral zone infractions yet? Every week. Early and often. It’s just the same penalties over and over. It’s become an epidemic. Whatever the coaches are doing to discourage this practice is not working. They keep jumping early.
As a play-caller, Schottenheimer is equally frustrating. The team doesn’t have much of a rushing attack, as the offense has struggled to deploy the physical ground game they so confidently promote during the summer. It’s been ineffective, and there have been moments when he has completely abandoned it, essentially acknowledging defeat.
That admission might be a little easier to accept if the offense possessed a high-powered aerial attack that many believe should accompany having one of the best wide receiving duos in the league. But they don’t.
For some reason, the team’s most explosive receiving weapons are underutilized. Schottenheimer fails to create mismatches, and the offense becomes very stagnant at times. No pre-snap motion or creative blocking schemes. The Cowboys’ offense has turned into a predictable entity that defenses can absolutely shut down at certain points in the game, and those moments are extremely harmful.
Under Schottenheimer, the Cowboys constantly invent new ways to lose football games. Against the Cardinals, it was the inability to run out the clock. Earlier in the year, against the Ravens, it was a goal-line debauchery that couldn’t win the game. Both instances put the pressure back on a porous defense to come through, and sadly, they did not.
The Cowboys don’t just lose. They actively engineer their own downfall through a blend of situational ineptitude and executive panic.
But if you listen to Schottenheimer’s postgame press conferences, he seems completely detached from reality. His media appearances have turned into comedy shows, highlighted by delusion and a lack of awareness. He stands at the table and claims to be a problem solver, yet no problems ever get solved. He throws out tired clichés and empty promises about how things need to get cleaned up, but each week the same chaos ensues.
The Cowboys are a 3-5 football team, and sadly, it’s fitting for who they are. Each week, they are favored against these bad teams because, on paper, they should be beating them. They have more talent. But none of that matters when the coaching puts them at such a disadvantage.
Star players become average, and average players become bad. So far, the evidence strongly suggests that Schottenheimer is not a head coach capable of leading an NFL team to victory, and with each new week, this is becoming more and more obvious.
