Troy Aikman on Dallas Cowboys’ next coach: ‘Why wouldn’t you go back to what worked?’
Troy Aikman said the Dallas Cowboys next head coach is only likely to be successful under one condition.
A return to a similar power structure the team had under Jimmy Johnson.
“The only way its been done under the [Jerry] Jones’ ownership has been with a head coach that everyone answered to,” Aikman said during his weekly radio show on KTCK/1310 “The Ticket.” “There were no questions in our locker room who was determining our future and that was Jimmy Johnson.”
Aikman said he holds Jason Garrett, who is likely to be replaced as the head coach after almost 10 seasons, in high regard as a person and a coach and called him a close friend. But winning is the bottom line. The Cowboys have just three playoff appearances in Garrett’s nine full seasons. And they’ve never won more than one postseason game in a year.
“The facts are there have been three playoff wins in the last 20-something years,” he said. “It’s not good enough. That’s why I’ve always said that you can’t just simply say after all these years of just replacing the coach that that’s necessarily going to change things. It’s ludicrous.”
The crux of the problem, Aikman said, is the team needs just one voice during a season.
“I don’t think players should be hearing from anyone other than one person. I don’t think the public should be hearing anything other than from one person. and that should be the head coach,” he said. “The head coach is the one who talks about who’s injured, who’s playing, who’s not playing. The players answer to him as to their fate and what’s expected of them. If they’re late to meetings, the head coach handles that.”
It’s a sentiment Aikman has shared often during the Cowboys two decades of futility.
“There’s been a long drought of not a lot of success. Why wouldn’t you go back to what worked? That’s the part that’s frustrating for me,” he said. “The fans deserve a lot. They pay a lot of money to go to the games. They pay a lot of money for the jerseys. They deserve the best opportunity to see their team win each and every Sunday and I don’t know that they’re always getting that.”
The problem, Aikman said, is compounded by the fact that the best coaches want total control, so despite the fact that the Cowboys’ job is one of the most attractive in sports, many are scared off by Jerry Jones’ meddling.
“The Dallas Cowboys are the greatest franchise in all of sports. And I think they should have the greatest coach. That’s the way I view it,” Aikman said. “I also know there are some great coaches that under the current structure as to whether they would [even] want to take the job. Head coaches who have success, even the brand of the Cowboys as tempting as that is, are not going to be put in that position. It could be a very attractive job if things are structured properly. You could get anybody you want, which is a pretty awesome position to be in.”
Aikman relayed a conversation he had with former Cowboy Martellus Bennett on the field before the season finale at AT&T Stadium.
“He’s a smart guy and I always like talking to him,” he said. Aikman asked him where he enjoyed playing the most? Bennett said New England, but not just because of the winning.
“Winning was great but I loved that everything that we did was just about football,” Bennett told Aikman.
“Amazing right? That’s the business we’re in,” Aikman said. “But sometimes I don’t know that football takes priority with the Cowboys and I think as a result sometimes then the product suffers. Let’s address it and do the things that put football first and go about trying to win football games and make that a priority.”
This story was originally published December 31, 2019 at 5:53 PM.
