The Cowboys continue to round out their coaching staff for first-year head coach Brian Schottenheimer. Their latest hire will be donning the star for a third time, both as a player and a coach.

Carlos Polk will reportedly be tabbed as the team’s assistant special teams coach, according to ESPN’s Todd Archer. Polk has spent the past three seasons in that same role with the Bears.

Polk had previously interviewed for the Cowboys’ special teams coordinator position. That job ultimately went to the 49ers’ Nick Sorensen on Jan. 28; Polk will now work directly under Sorensen…. for the second time in his career.

Polk, who will turn 48 later this month, has been with five NFL teams- all as a special teams assistant- since 2010. He was with Dallas in 2019, the final year of the Jason Garrett regime. Prior to that, he served on staff with the Chargers and Buccaneers; after not being retained by Mike McCarthy in 2020, Polk was out of the game for year.

He returned to the sidelines in 2021 in Jacksonville, where he was Sorensen’s special teams assistant coordinator the first time, for the Jaguars’ 2021 season, before finally landing in Chicago in 2022.

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As a player, Polk was listed as a linebacker but made the majority of his impact on special teams over eight NFL seasons. Drafted by San Diego in the fourth round out of Nebraska in 2001, Polk was named Special Teams Player of the Year by his Chargers teammates the following season.

In 2006, a four-game stretch where he filled in for Shawne Merriman helped him earn the team’s Ed Block Courage Award. The next year, he shared the club’s Most Inspirational Player Award with quarterback Philip Rivers. But Polk did not make the Chargers roster in 2008, and he found himself on the free agency market.

That’s when the Cowboys came calling, reuniting him with head coach Wade Phillips, who had been his defensive coordinator in San Diego. A depth signing by Dallas, Polk did contribute on special teams but was not re-signed after the 2008 campaign, spelling the end of his playing career.

Now back in Dallas in a familiar role and under a coordinator he knows well, Polk will help head up a unit that includes Pro Bowl kicker Brandon Aubrey and All-Pro returner KaVontae Turpin as well as special teams standouts C.J. Goodwin, Israel Mukuamu, Nick Vigil, Juanyeh Thomas, and Markquese Bell.