The Dallas Cowboys have had an on-again, off-again approach to head coaches calling plays over the last quarter century. In fact, going back all the way back to Bill Parcells, every single head coach (except Brian Schottenheimer) has been both a play-caller and a walk-around coach without play-calling duties, though not necessarily in that order.
Bill Parcells: From 2003-2004, Parcells was the official play-caller for the Cowboys, though nobody was quite sure who was calling in the actual plays. One
popular theory at the time held that Parcells would instruct guys like Tony Sparano, Sean Payton, or even his first offensive coordinator, Maurice Carthon, to “go deep” or “run it right” and his guys would then call in the actual plays. True or not, Sean Payton started calling plays on offense in 2005, and Jason Garrett took over as offensive coordinator in 2006, making Parcells a true walk-around head coach.
Wade Philips: In 2007, Philips started out as a walk-around head coach, but he took over the defensive play-calling duties from DC Brian Stewart in October 2008 following defensive struggles, and kept them until he was relieved of his head coaching duties midway through the 2010 season.
Jason Garrett: Garrett took over has interim head coach from Philips and continued calling plays on offense until Jerry Jones announced in early 2013 that Jason Garrett would no longer be calling plays and that the Cowboys would benefit from Garrett being a “Walk-Around Coach”.
Mike McCarthy: McCarthy arrived in Dallas in 2020 and inherited Kellen Moore as the playcaller on offense. Moore would maintain the position over three years in which the Cowboys finished #1, #3, and #1 in scoring in the NFL. But McCarthy didn’t want an offensive to “light the scoreboard up”, let Moore walk to the Eagles, installed something called a “Texas Coast Offense”, and took over playcalling. That, coupled with key injuries, proved to be the nail in the coffin for McCarthy in Dallas, which finished 21st in scoring in 2024.
At the time, Garrett’s “promotion” to walk-around head coach generated a lot of offseason discussion, not the least because it was widely felt that this was a move pushed by Jerry Jones, and Garrett did not appear to be 100% on board. Here’s how Jerry explained his rationale at the time.
“It has more to do with the positives that go with it, which everybody recognizes,” Jones said, via the Fort Worth Star-Telegram,” that if you have more time to not be the busiest man in the whole organization–the offensive play-caller–if you have more time to move around on every aspect of the team, early in the week, in the middle of the week and during game-day, there’ll be a tremendous benefit from that.”
And the topic of being involved in every aspect of the team – offense, defense, special teams – is one that has also been raised after Schottenheimer’s first year. Would the defense and special teams have benefited from more involvement from the head coach in 2025? That’s hard to say from a distance, but even Schottenheimer hinted that a more forceful approach to the defense might have helped last year.
At the recent OTAs press conference, Schottenheimer reflected on what he’s learned in his first year when he was asked about how he would handle first-time coordinator Christian Parker.
I would say it’s not so much about [Christian Parker] and more about what I’ve learned going into year two as a head coach and doing the good-better-how on myself in areas where I feel I could have been better last year in terms of early on.
I spent so much time last year with the offense because Klayton [Adams] was a first-time coordinator that I didn’t really do as much on the defense, and by the time I got over there, I felt it was a little bit too late in some regards. We made some changes, but at the end of the day the product wasn’t good enough.
Which brings us back to Garrett. Despite his initial misgivings about giving up playcalling, he understood that juggling two full-time jobs could be challenging.
“I think it’s been a good thing,” Garrett said, via Charean Williams of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “It’s something that we’ve tried to do since I became the head coach, coming from the coordinator position. They’re two full-time jobs, and in order to do each of them well, you have to focus on really every aspect of them. They’re only so many hours in the day, so since I became the head coach, I was always trying to delegate some of the responsibilities I had within the coordinator position and within some of the head coaching responsibilities that I had. So now I can be more focused on some of the head coaching stuff.
“Certainly, I’m in all of the meetings on offense and many of the meetings on defense during the week. With the installations of the plays, I’m involved in all that. But you need to delegate and more importantly empower the people around you to do those jobs. We’ve done that. I think that structure has worked well for us. That doesn’t mean that because we’re in that structure, everything is going to be perfect. We need to keep working hard to make whatever structure we use the best it can be for our players to execute ball plays.”
Garrett was quite complimentary about the change a few years later, and his summary echoes the points Schottenheimer also brought up.
“This is a good structure that we have in place right now. It certainly affords me the opportunity to be more involved in a lot of different parts of our team. We have people in place who I trust to do those jobs well in the structure that we have them, so I think those are all positives.
“You can be more involved in the defense, more involved in the kicking game, more involved in the offense, more involved with personnel, how the roster is put together, and I think those are all positive things for a head coach to be able to do.”
Schottenheimer on the other hand, while recognizing all the benefits of being a walk-around head coach, has no intention of giving up playcalling any time soon.
I’m the playcaller here. I love being the playcaller here. I’m pretty good at it, I think. So that is never going to change – I should never say “never” – maybe in 10-12 years from now maybe I will.
Being the head coach matters, and I think it’s how you start it. Right now, I’ve been in probably 50% of the offensive and 50% of the defensive meetings. Why? Because I think I have to be the head coach.
After Week 1, 2025, ESPN looked at the playcallers around the league to see which teams were having their head coaches calling plays, and which teams had delegated that responsibility to their offensive coordinators. And superficially, it looks like an even split across the league: 16 teams have a play-calling head coach, 16 have an OC calling plays.
But that number is skewed by 12 teams that had head coaches with a defensive background, and therefore had to defer playcalling to an offensive coordinator. Excluding those 12 teams, that leaves us with 20 teams whose head coaches had an offensive background. And of those 20 teams, 16 (or 80%) had their head coaches calling plays. The four exceptions last year were Dan Campbell in Detroit, Nick Sirianni in Philadelphia, Brian Daboll in New York, and Jim Harbaugh with the Chargers.
That means the NFL’s clearly preferred model (at least in 2025) is for a head coach with an offensive background to call his own plays. Jerry Jones on the other hand has expressed a preference for a walk-around head coach in the past, and Cowboys history goes both ways.
Over to you: Should Brian Schottenheimer give up play-calling duties?
