The Dallas Cowboys don’t appear to be heading in the right direction under head coach Brian Schottenheimer. With the team sitting at 4-5, calls for the team to move on from Schottenheimer have already surfaced.
This week, one NFL executive argued in a conversation with The Athletic’s Mike Sando that the Cowboys should make that move so they can hire Super Bowl-winning head coach and new broadcaster Mike Tomlin.
Sando wrote this on what an executive said to him on Monday:
“The problem there is Jerry’s age (84),” an exec from another team said. “So my thought is, that’s where you start to circle for Mike Tomlin. Maybe he just relents, much like when he got Bill Parcells, when he kind of gave in to the powerful coach a little bit.”
By relents, the executive meant for Jerry Jones to both open his wallet and give up some control of the team’s direction as general manager.
With Tomlin, the Cowboys could add a coach who is a proven winner. He also specializes in Dallas’ current biggest weakness and is already familiar with several Cowboys players.
Tomlin is a defensive coach, and knows Joey Porter, for instance, and he just has a way about himself,” added the executive to Sando.
Tomlin won the Super Bowl in his second season as Pittsburgh Steelers head coach. He also amassed a 193-114-2 regular season record in Pittsburgh.
Would Cowboys Hiring Mike Tomlin Make Sense?
Sando compared Dallas potentially hiring Tomlin as its next head coach to when Jones brought in Bill Parcells more than two decades ago.
“The first four coaches Jones hired — Jimmy Johnson, Barry Switzer, Chan Gailey and Dave Campo — never earned more than $1 million per season,” wrote Sando.
“Parcells signed a four-year, $17.1 million deal in 2003, a huge swing for Jones.”
Since hiring Parcells, though, Jones has swung back in the other direction, hiring head coaches on the cheap. Schottenheimer reportedly earns about $5 million per season, which is half to one-third of what other head coaches that were also hired two years ago make — Mike Vrabel, Ben Johnson and Liam Coen.
Sando argued that “money equals power” for head coaches and by paying less for a head coach, Jones retains his power with the Cowboys. Paying less for a coach doesn’t hurt Jones’s revenue either.
During the first week of November, Jones said on 105.3 The Fan there is no correlation to head coach salaries and winning. The Cowboys owner received significant criticism for that remark.
Last Friday, Jones responded to the outcry:
“The facts are I have been out there, and I have been trying to lure very successful coaches away from the teams they were on and knew full well that I was going to pay them for their success,” Jones said, via ESPN’s Todd Archer. “So that has been done. No one knows that, but I do. And so it is absolutely ridiculous. And I actually grin when somebody says, ‘Jerry’s not willing to pay the money for what it would take to get the right kind of coach out there.'”
Will Cowboys Fire Brian Schottenheimer?
There are a lot of potential moving parts with the Cowboys possibly hiring Tomlin. It’s not even clear if the former Steelers head coach would be interested. Tomlin appears to be enjoying his television gig this season with NBC Sports.
Whether the Cowboys are in the market for a new head coach will depend on if they part with Schottenheimer.
With a below .500 record in 2026 following the team’s 7-9-1 finish in his first season last year, it’s not a stretch to say Schottenheimer is on the hot seat. The Cowboys might have to show tangible improvement, particularly on defense, for the coach to keep his job in 2027.
Schottenheimer is 11-14-1 in a season and a half with the Cowboys. Entering Week 10, the team is three games back in the loss column of the first-place New York Giants.
Cowboys Urged to Replace Brian Schottenheimer With Super Bowl-Winning Coach