Tag: Dave Campo

Former Cowboys head coach criticizes Dan Quinn

Dave Campo happens to be the worst coach in Cowboys’ history.

The Dallas Cowboys have had nine head coaches in the 64-year history of the franchise. Only one of those coaches finished his tenure in Dallas with a losing record: Dave Campo.

Campo was the Dallas head coach from 2000-02 and had a 15-33 record in three seasons. Campo replaced Chan Gailey and was replaced by the legendary Bill Parcells.

To say Campo bleeds Cowboys’ blue would be an understatement. He arrived in Dallas with Jimmy Johnson in 1989. After serving as an assistant under Johnson, Barry Switzer, and Gailey, Campo got his shot at leading the franchise in 2000.

After he was fired and had stints with the Browns and Jaguars, he returned to the Cowboys in 2008 as the defensive backs coach for four seasons under Wade Phillips and Jason Garrett.

Since leaving Dallas after 2011, Campo served as an assistant with the Kansas Jayhawks and, most recently, a two-year stint with the USC Trojans (2018-19) as an analyst.

Campo still follows the Cowboys closely and is friends with Dallas’ new defensive coordinator, Mike Zimmer. Campo and Zimmer first worked together in 1981 at Weber State. They were reunited with the Cowboys in 1994 when Switzer hired Zimmer as a defensive assistant.

After six seasons as a defensive assistant, Campo promoted Zimmer to defensive coordinator in 2000 when he took over as head coach. When Campo was fired, Parcells kept Zimmer as his defensive coordinator.

Safe to say, Campo is happy to see his old friend back in charge of the Dallas defense.

But what about the Cowboys’ former defensive coordinator, Dan Quinn? Quinn departed after leading the Cowboys defense for three seasons to become the new head coach of the Washington Commanders.

Campo had some criticism for Quinn.

“From a culture standpoint…… I’ll just say one thing this way,” Campo said in an appearance on the San Antonio Sports Star, as transcribed by Blogging the Boys.

“I know Dan Quinn very well. I was not in the office, in the building, I’m here in Jacksonville, so I saw a bunch of the games. I saw that game. I’m going a little bit on some hearsay. But I think the one thing about Dan is he’s a fine gentleman, and he’s smart, and his scheme was okay, but he was a little bit too buddy-buddy, I think, with the players, and that’s part of it. You can’t have a lot of accountability if you don’t stand a little bit above it of the people that you’re trying to get to be accountable.”

Campo then criticized Quinn’s defense for being too small.

It’s fair to criticize Quinn’s unit for being too small and unable to stop the run, but his three-year run in charge of the Cowboys’ defense was the best three-year run that side of the ball has had in ages.

Quinn’s defense led the NFL in turnovers by a wide margin over the past three years and finished in the top five of FTN’s defensive DVOA in each of his three seasons. While many will remember the blowout loss to the Packers more than Quinn’s success, that isn’t a fair way to judge his tenure in Dallas.

His players will miss him. And fans, if the defense takes a step back under Zimmer, will miss him, too.

As they say, you never know what you have until it’s gone. Ask Eagles coach Nick Sirianni about that after losing both coordinators last offseason.

Campo sticking up for Zimmer is not a surprise. Once it was revealed that Zimmer would return to the Cowboys, Campo said the following on Twitter.

No one knows how Quinn’s tenure in Washington will turn out, but Campo’s comments are one-sided and well-timed. When you base your public comments on hearsay, that’s never a good look.

While Campo may be beloved by some segments of the Dallas fan base, he had a .313 winning percentage as head coach. As Parcells often said, “You are what your record says you are.”

Dave Campo: Cowboys starring in HBO series is ‘a little bit invasive’

The former Cowboys coach thinks ‘Hard Knocks’ is a distraction that current coach Mike McCarthy doesn’t need entering the 2021 season.

The Cowboys’ upcoming appearance on HBO’s Hard Knocks may be a welcome addition to the TV lineup for many of the team’s fans this summer, but some see the bright lights and ever-present camera crews as just one more thing the Cowboys don’t need as they attempt to improve on a dreadful 6-10 season in 2020.

Count former head coach Dave Campo among the latter group. Campo was at the helm when the Cowboys were first featured on the behind-the-scenes series back in 2002, the show’s second season on the air.

“It’s a little bit invasive,” Campo told 105.3 The Fan and SI‘s Mike Fisher, “and that’s the one thing I think is a little bit tough. The marketing part of the Cowboys? It’s a great thing, because everybody in the country gets an opportunity to [see them]. Whether you like the Cowboys or not- it’s a good thing for the club. For the players, it’s not bad because I think they like the idea of being on-camera and the national people seeing them every week. But for the coaching staff, especially in a year where you have a little bit of pressure on you to win, it’s a little bit tougher. You’re constantly in the eye. I think for Coach McCarthy, it might not be his favorite thing.”

Campo certainly had plenty of dramatic subplots around him when HBO came calling in 2002, his third season as coach. The spotlight was intense on running back Emmitt Smith as he prepared to break the all-time rushing mark. The club had a quarterback controversy to deal with, as Quincy Carter competed for snaps against newly-signed baseball prodigy Chad Hutchinson. Rookie safety Roy Williams carried massive expectations as he entered camp a top-10 overall draft pick.

Multi-million dollar careers and lifelong dreams hung in the balance, as they do for every team that appears on the series. It’s a recipe for reality-TV ratings, but Campo admitted it’s very difficult to handle the necessary business of football without “performing” for the cameras.

“You really can’t, in a way,” Campo confessed. “You know you’re being looked at every second.”

The coach called having to sit a player down and cut him from the roster while being filmed especially difficult. And having to come home and explain workplace dynamics to family and friends who’ve watched it as entertainment in the living room was just as bad.

“My son was 11 years old,” Campo explained. “He saw the first episode, and I talked to him after the show came on. He said, ‘Dad, I learned the alphabet today: the A-word, the B-word, the C-word, the F-word…’ He heard them all, unfortunately. It wasn’t the greatest experience, to be honest with you.”

But the 73-year-old knows that whether it’s the Cowboys or any other NFL franchise, the allure of the publicity gained by starring in the series may be too much for any owner to turn down, despite the discouraging track record of teams who have appeared. Few teams go on to a postseason berth following their Hard Knocks series.

Campo’s 2002 squad went 5-11 to finish last in the NFC East. He would be fired afterward. He remains the only Cowboys head coach to have never posted a winning record or coached a playoff game.

This year in Dallas, there’s already a growing sense for some that current head coach Mike McCarthy is on the hot seat to make a deep playoff run in just his second season on the sidelines… or else.

“I think there’s a little pressure on Mike McCarthy now. And I don’t think that [the show]’s in his best interest… It’s too much scrutiny, and it’s a distraction, in a way.”

McCarthy and the Cowboys had plenty of distractions in his first campaign last year. For the team that battled through a virtual offseason, pandemic restrictions, and losing their star quarterback five games into a record-pace season to still come within reach of an improbable divisional crown, maybe a few cameras and microphones won’t be quite as disruptive.

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