Why a new head coach isn’t enough to turn a 7-win team into a contender again

The Cowboys are looking for a new head coach, but that hardly guarantees them anything.

Many Dallas Cowboys fans are at least moderately excited about the prospect of getting a new coaching staff assembled. But the historical record of coaching changes on seven-win teams does not bode well for the 2025 Cowboys, especially given how prone this front office is to thinking that whatever changes (or the absence of changes, see 2024) they made one season will automatically elevate the franchise to contenders the next season.

Between the introduction of the salary cap in 1994 (to use a random but relevant data point in league history) and 2024, 20 teams fired/exchanged their head coach after a seven-win season, and there’s some sobering stuff to be gleaned from looking at the historical record of those coaching changes.

• Only five of the 20 teams (25%) improved to a winning record the following year.
• Four teams (20%) either remained stuck at seven wins or improved to a Jason Garrett signature eight-win season the following year.
• 11 teams (55%) finished the following season with a worse record, despite the coaching change. Yikes!
• And it gets even worse for the Cowboys: Only three teams made the playoffs with a new coach after their seven-win season, and only one team (the 2013 Chargers) won a playoff game after a seven-win season and a coaching change.

Here’s the full data set.

When you fire the head coach (or let him walk, or don’t renew his contract, or whatever narrative floats your boat), it’s often because the entire organization failed, and not just the one guy at the top of the coaching organization chart. When you’re looking to fix that organization, you’re going to have to look at more than just the coaching. Because if you don’t, history suggests you’ll quickly find yourself back in the position you wanted to get out of in the first place.

But while firing Mike McCarthy was the right decision (even if long overdue), it combines with Dak’s injury (and the many other injuries) to provide the Cowboys with waaaay too many convenient excuses for everything that went sideways with the Cowboys last season, and thus provides carte blanche for the Cowboys to continue doing business as usual elsewhere.

In Dallas, the general thinking seems to be that changing out the coaching staff and getting key players back healthy should be enough to (again) be a Super Bowl contender despite the evidence above to the contrary. And as such the Cowboys front office is probably okay with thinking that

• an offense that averaged just 21 points with its star quarterback in eight games in 2024 just needs to establish the run a little more and everything will fall into place.
• a defense that ranked 28th in defensive passer rating and 31st in points allowed just needs a second year of Mike Zimmer fairy dust to become a Top 10 unit.
• a defensive line that ranked 28th in rushing yards per attempt just needs to invest in some over-the-hill free agent defensive tackles and you’ll be a lock for the next NFC Championship game.
• a scouting department that brought in Ezekiel Elliott and Dalvin Cook to help out in the running game, traded a fourth for Jonathan Mingo, and has an increasingly spotty draft record should be rewarded by giving its boss another extension.
• a franchise worth $11 billion dollars can get by with a shoddy training room (ranked 26th among all NFL teams in a players survey) and an undermanned training staff (30th) because, hey, we’re America’s Team!
• an analytics department that may have had a big impact internally but didn’t have any noticeable impact on McCarthy’s game calling or game management or any other aspect of the product the team put on the field each week just needs an extra year to show its impact.
• a front office with a track record of unnecessarily prolonging contract negotiations should continue to be entrusted to do whatever it is they are doing.
• a cap manager who thinks he “has a good feel for the salary cap” and could create $85 million in cap space with a few simple restructures next year (and up to $120 million with max restructures, the fifth highest value in the league) should be allowed to continue doing his thing without bringing in some external expertise that understands it’s not 1995 anymore.
• an organization that thinks it went “all-in” and ended up at 7-10 can continue doing business as usual and doesn’t really need to change much.

The Cowboys are hoping that the personnel change on the coaching side can provide new impulses to an organization that may have gone stale. And they may be right. But I bet that’s what all 20 of the teams mentioned above thought too, and it didn’t exactly work out too well for them.

The Cowboys can beat the odds, but they can’t just hope that shaking up the coaching staff will automatically improve things. They need to attack the entire offseason with a level of urgency and accountability that we haven’t seen in Dallas in a long time.

Every team makes mistakes in the draft and in free agency. Not all draft picks pan out the way they were expected to. Not all free agents deliver a performance commensurate with the money you spent on them. Not all new coaching hires are an automatic improvement over their predecessors.

But accountability means that you don’t accept injuries as a convenient excuse for the next season and you don’t use the coach you just fired as the fall guy for all sorts of issues plaguing the team. Accountability also means that you have to be a bit more aggressive in creating cap space with restructures than you’ve grown comfortable with. Accountability also means ensuring that your roster doesn’t just look good on paper, on social media, or in ads, but also on the field. And finally, accountability also means defining a clear target for your head coach for the year, and then pulling the plug on the guy if the targets aren’t met, regardless of how many years are left on his contract.

Normally, a season that’s been as disappointing as the 2024 Cowboys season would prompt most NFL teams to rethink their entire operation. Not so in Dallas. Because if you read the previous paragraph carefully, you’ll realize that the lack of accountability I described has been going on for at least the last decade in Dallas, and probably longer.

Jerry Jones promised the Cowboys will get better.

“Rest assured we’ll be figuring out ways to look for what we’re doing wrong and improve on that. … The bottom line is that we’ve got to get better. We will get better. There are better days ahead.”

Your turn, Jerry.