I just wish Jerry Jones didn't own the team.
This sums it up pretty well.
http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Sports
Dec. 21, 2002, 11:58PM
Cowboys only have room for one would-be genius
By DALE ROBERTSON
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle
IRVING -- Holy mackerel! A Tuna Christmas for the Cowboys?
Pardon my carping, but Bill Parcells would be a whale of a hire for Jerry Jones. However insufferable he may be, look at the man's record. Tuna can coach. He has won everywhere he has been, and he would win in Big D, too.
Except, in Jones' world, Jerry is the oyster. If he looks to the sea to replace Dave Campo -- and replace him he must, a notion the unfeeling Eagles further reinforced with a 27-3 drubbing Saturday night -- it's going to be a Dolphin he pulls from his net.
The name Norv Turner ring a bell?
The Cowboys' situation is not one in which familiarity breeds the least bit contempt. Although Jerry might relish picking the brains of the NFL's deepest thinkers -- last year it was Bill Walsh; this year it's Parcells -- he'd never risk hiring one. Because the Parcells type would want, not unreasonably, a full measure of autonomy, the freedom to rebuild the Cowboys as he saw fit, in his image.
That would never fly with Jones, who fashions himself as the voice of God in these parts. He couldn't keep the clamps on that rascal Jimmy Johnson and, despite back-to-back Super Bowl championships, you saw how their marriage soured. But Jones ran herd on Barry Switzer, Chan Gailey and Campo, and he will be able to subjugate Turner, the bright former Johnson assistant who failed as a head coach with Washington.
Norv was having a splendid season coordinating the Miami offense in the service of his former Dallas staff-mate Dave Wannstedt until the Dolphins ventured into the Metrodome Saturday, but that meltdown is unlikely to impact Turner's presence on Jones' very short list of candidates to succeed Campo.
Turner seems the perfect sideline emissary for Jerry, which matters more than whether he's the perfect choice to orchestrate the Cowboys' climb back to respectability. (He's not.) Turner definitely knows his "O's," and he can already find his way around Valley Ranch. Most importantly, though, he has an assistant coach's temperament, an essential trait for an owner who calls all the shots, if not all the plays.
A Jones-Parcells partnership would explode in a matter of days, hours maybe. If it didn't blow over the decision-making, it certainly would over the credit-taking. Both think they are geniuses. Only one of them -- Parcells -- might be.
The Cowboys won a Super Bowl after Johnson on muscle memory alone, but they have won just a single playoff game since, over a span of seven seasons. The current team became the third in a row to miss the playoffs. Another loss at Washington next weekend, a result strongly favored by the law of averages given the Cowboys' 10-0 streak against the Redskins, will complete a third consecutive 5-11 season.
The hopelessly naive had bravely predicted the players' personal affection for the likeable Campo would translate into the same kind of supreme effort the dead-end Vikings unleashed to harpoon the Dolphins earlier in the day, but that would hardly be the case. Nor would Emmitt Smith's all-but-inevitable farewell to Texas Stadium provide sufficient motivation for the Cowboys to stave off another perfunctory beating.
The Cowboys couldn't even achieve the one meaningful objective they went into the game with, securing a record 12th consecutive 1,000-yard season for the NFL's most prolific rusher ever in front of his loyal adoring fans. With half the stadium full of people in No. 22 jerseys, including a Santa Clause, Emmitt fell 38 yards short of the 68 he needed.
Eagles' super-sub A.J. Feeley, the No. 3 quarterback on Philadelphia's depth chart when the season began, could have been Donovan McNabb the way he freely pillaged Dallas' secondary. If Parcells was watching, he recognized the enormity of the task confronting whomever supplants the doomed Campo. But Tuna, who once turned a 1-15 Jets team into a Super Bowl contender, surely believes the situation is no hill for a climber of his Sir Edmund Hillary stature.
And it isn't. Dallas' defense is solid, its touchy-feely effort against Feeley notwithstanding, while Chad Hutchinson has gobs of upside, no matter that evidence of same was rarely displayed against the Eagles' hungry defense. Parcells could fix the Cowboys, but he wouldn't do it in a way that would suitably massage Jones' Texas-sized ego.
Jones wants to win as badly as anybody, but he wants the credit for winning more than almost everybody. With Parcells on his sideline, Jerry would risk being exposed as irrelevant. If Turner, on the other hand, succeeded, Jerry could do no worse than share the glare with Norv.
There can't be official contact between Jones and Turner until the Dolphins' season ends. Parcells, for his part, coyly deflected point-blank inquiries by his ESPN colleague, Chris Mortensen, in response to the story -- which CBS broke despite Parcell's drawing a sizeable paycheck from the sports cable network -- that he huddled with Jerry for five hours.
In a brief pre-game news conference, Jones said the conversation was purely philosophical in nature, the job was neither offered nor even discussed and no further meetings have been scheduled. Unfortunately for Cowboy fans, Jerry was telling the truth.
This time, it was no fish story.