The Dallas Cowboys are the most valuable professional sports team in the world. They are worth an absurd amount of money. It is sometimes noted how that the Cowboys are shy about spending in free agency with regards to their overall worth, and that obviously is void of any kind of context as the team, like their 31 counterparts in the NFL, have to operate within the defined salary cap.
We can save discussions for how the Cowboys can still afford (no pun intended) to be more active in free agency for another
day, but on this one we are talking about how they currently have an opportunity to weaponize their value, both their financial one and the subsequent opportunities that are born from being associated with them.
Ed Werder really crystallized this with an X post on Tuesday as he noted that the candidates who Brian Schottenheimer seems to be targeting for the vacant defensive coordinator position are all young and popular candidates who have interest elsewhere.
Oftentimes when matters like this come up in the NFL the tiebreaker can be who is going to pay the most. We have accepted that the Cowboys tend to lose this tiebreaker in free agency because they won’t go past a certain point, but no such limit exists with regards to coaches. They can write all of the blank checks they want.
Now to be fully clear here, Werder’s point wasn’t simply that the Cowboys need to throw money at would-be DC candidates for the problem to be solved. He was saying that financial values represent security which is something that anyone who is worth their salt is going to be looking for.
It is easy to say that the Cowboys defensive coordinator job is a tenuous one because whoever takes it will be the fourth person in as many years to hold the title, but the context of that is really important.
- Dan Quinn was the DC in 2023, his third year on the job, and left because of head coaching opportunities after being a hot candidate following each of the previous two years as well.
- The Cowboys went about everything in 2024 in a poor way and had Mike McCarthy go into the year in the final year of his contract which made finding a DC difficult, so Mike Zimmer was selected.
- Matt Eberflus was a logical (in their mind) choice because of Brian Schottenheimer’s green-ness in terms of being an NFL head coach and he had head coach experience himself, but everything was a disaster.
There isn’t poor job security because the Cowboys keep firing dudes for fielding a poor defense. The numbers are what they are because of some poor front office decisions, that is totally fair, but the person who is eventually taking this job is doing so under very different circumstances than Eberflus or Zimmer. In fact, the person who will take this job is doing so under the exact circumstances that Dan Quinn did as he joined the staff in the second year of a head coach’s regime after the team fired a defensive coordinator following a horrible season. History really does repeat itself.
It goes without saying that money can help “explain” all of those things in a more palatable way which is again why the Cowboys should use the full might of who they are in this process and any of a similar ilk. If they get a top candidate it will really tell us if they did one way or another.
