Jerry Jones has made an absurd mess of the Cowboys coaching situation

What is happening.

Well, it appears that everyone, everywhere, knows that Jason Garrett is not going to coach the Dallas Cowboys next season.

Everyone except Jason Garrett, it seems. Garret is 85-67 over 10 seasons leading the Cowboys, and he’s gone 2-3 in the playoffs without ever advancing past the Divisional round. Dallas somehow managed to not emerge from the putrid NFC East this season and it’s abundantly clear that change is needed. Even good coaches rarely last a decade with one NFL team; mediocre ones only do if the owner is Jerry Jones.

And yet the Cowboys have not actually relieved Garrett, it seems. Instead they’re just letting his contract expire while … still meeting with him and allowing him to plead for his job while ALSO inviting potential replacements into town? All this according to Fox’s Jay Glazer:

Never seen anything like it, indeed.

Jones is the most involved owner in the league, by a wide margin, and while he’ll repeatedly say how important winning is to him it sure appears like being in the mix, controlling the narrative around his team and doing things his way — without the nasty influence of clear-thinking executives who might dissuade him — are, in fact, what matter most to Jones.

To be honest, there’s something nice about Jones sticking with Garrett — who was a longtime backup for the team (his father was a scout for Dallas) — for so long, and now apparently having so much trouble letting him go. Something human.

Letting it linger helps nobody, though, and muddies the search for a replacement. Jones is going to want to make a splashy hire — whatever that means — and that’s going to require convincing a coveted coach to … well, put up with working for Jerry Jones. There’s plenty of good that comes with that, of course, primarily a desire to spend what it takes to win. But the sideshow can’t be ignored; no other NFL job comes along with the possibility that the guy signing your paycheck might question you in the media after any given week.

Projecting this much instability is the last thing Jones should be doing. It all seems so very desperate — and it probably is. The Cowboys won their third Super Bowl in four years after the 1995 season, but have only won the East seven times since then — without even making it to an NFC Championship game. If you’d told Jones, way back then, that it would play out this way he would have laughed you out of his luxury suite.

Yet here we are, and the Cowboys are showing all the hallmarks of an organization that is under relentless pressure to improve without having a plan in place for how to do so. Is that something Lincoln Riley or Matt Rhule, young college coaches who will get other chances, would want to sign up for?

Anyway, at least all of this has given us some good internet content. Always, there is internet content.

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