Brian Schottenheimer is at a crossroads. His first season on the job as the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys showed some promise, but there was a fatal flaw: the defense. With a slightly better defense this past year, Dallas wins at least four more games, giving them 11 wins and surely a spot in the postseason.
It’s why Matt Eberflus was fired after just one year. And if Schottenheimer can’t get things right on that side of the ball, people will start to question when Schottenheimer joins his former
coordinator. Fair or not, that’s the way this league operates.
As rumors continue to percolate, there seems to be a growing trend in this coordinator search: that the top two candidates are Jim Leonhard and Jonathan Gannon. We previously laid out why Leonhard would be a home run hire, giving the Cowboys their own version of Vikings mastermind Brian Flores.
Gannon, however, would be a disastrous hire.
The recently-fired Cardinals head coach was already one of five names we warned against. Now that he’s getting serious consideration, though, Gannon’s track record merits a deeper dive.
Just 43 years old, Gannon has had a meteoric rise in the coaching ranks. A former safety at Louisville, Gannon transitioned to a coach after an injury ended his playing career. When Louisville head coach Bobby Petrino took the head coaching job with the Falcons, he brought Gannon along as a quality control coach.
There, Gannon was working under defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer. Later that season, Petrino controversially stepped down to go back to college and coach Arkansas (a tenure that also ended in controversy for Petrino). At the time, Zimmer had little positive to say about the coach.
Gannon spent the next two years at the bottom of the totem pole with the Titans before being hired as the assistant defensive backs in Minnesota, not long after Zimmer was hired as the head coach. After four seasons there, Gannon was named the defensive backs coach in Indianapolis under newly-hired coordinator Matt Eberflus.
Yes, that Matt Eberflus.
That was the same Colts staff that featured Nick Sirianni as the offensive coordinator, though head coach Frank Reich called plays on offense. When Sirianni was hired to coach the Eagles, he brought Gannon with him as his defensive coordinator.
One of the first things Gannon did in running his own defense was establish a mantra: HITS. It stood for Hustle, Intensity, Takeaways, and Smart. It encapsulated everything he wanted his defense to be about. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the exact same thing Eberflus preached in Indianapolis, later taking the mantra to Chicago and then to Dallas.
There lies the first big problem with Gannon: he is, in many ways, an Eberflus disciple. He spent more time working with Zimmer, but Gannon has been candid about how much he’s taken from Eberflus. So why would the Cowboys replace Eberflus with him?
Putting that burning red flag aside, Gannon’s run as the Eagles defensive coordinator was a decidedly mixed bag. His first season on the job saw Philadelphia finish 17th in EPA/play. They jumped up to fourth the next year, but they were 23rd against the run and were 18th in the fourth quarter and overtime.
Gannon’s defenses got gashed on the ground repeatedly, but they were helped out by the fact that their offense was playing at such a high level that opponents had to abandon their run game early on; only seven teams saw fewer rush attempts than Philadelphia.
Meanwhile, Gannon’s defense was frequently criticized that year for a lack of in-game adjustments, evidenced by their horrible efficiency metric in end-of-game settings. In half of their regular season games, the Eagles were outscored in the fourth quarter, including all three of their losses.
They also held a 24-14 halftime lead over the Chiefs in the Super Bowl, and Kansas City scored 24 second-half points, including 17 in the fourth quarter alone, to come back and win. That featured two different scoring plays for the Chiefs, both using the same concept, and both springing the wide receiver wide open in the endzone. Gannon never adjusted.
Gannon’s unwillingness to adjust proved to be his downfall in Arizona, too.
The Cardinals went 4-13 in his first year on the job, but quarterback Kyler Murray missed most of the year with an injury suffered the previous season, so Gannon got a pass. They started out the next year well, jumping out to a 6-4 start with two one-score losses to the Bills and Lions.
Then they collapsed, dropping five of their final seven games to finish 8-9. If not for wins over the dreadful Patriots and excessively injured 49ers, they’d have finished on a seven-game losing streak. And Gannon never had a solution for it.
That carried over into this year, as Arizona started off 2-0 before finishing 3-14. It’s the worst season in franchise history, and saw them finish on a nine-game losing streak. Even then, reports suggest owner Michael Bidwill wanted to keep Gannon, but also wanted a new offensive coordinator. When Gannon refused to fire Drew Petzing, that led to his termination.
That’s the same level of stubbornness that just saw Eberflus refuse to blitz or play man coverage despite having players who are at their best when doing exactly that. Unlike Eberflus, Gannon has been known to use more five man fronts and he does do more work to disguise his coverages – really the one thing he took from his time with Zimmer – but the two coaches still share a stubborn commitment to doing things their way.
By the way, while Gannon didn’t call defensive plays as the head coach, his Cardinals defenses were still awful. Their best season was 2024, when they ranked 16th in EPA/play. They were in the bottom five the other two seasons, and Arizona was 28th in EPA/play over the three-year span Gannon led the team.
Gannon has also been the subject of two fairly significant controversies.
His hiring in Arizona was immediately overshadowed by a tampering investigation regarding how he was hired. It ended with the Cardinals giving up 28 spots in the draft order as punishment. Then, this year, Gannon drew intense scrutiny after striking one of his players following a costly fumble, which led to the Cardinals personally fining Gannon $100,000 over the incident.
To boil it all down to one thing, Gannon wouldn’t represent change. Not only is he a proud disciple of Eberflus, he’s frequently demonstrated the same kind of stubbornness and lack of in-game awareness that got Eberflus in so much trouble. And his questionable conduct also makes it hard to square Gannon as fitting Schottenheimer’s bill of a teacher.
Hiring Gannon would ultimately signify that the Cowboys learned nothing from this past year.
