Jason Witten says he never spoke to Jerry Jones about a role on the Cowboys staff.
The Dallas Cowboys have a new head coach for 2025 in Brian Schottenheimer, and while it was a few weeks ago that this officially became the case, the process the team took to ultimately land him felt long and arduous.
A big reason for those feelings was that the Cowboys took forever to start the process to begin with given how they handled the Mike McCarthy situation. We aren’t here to re-litigate any of that, but to discuss one of the more interesting turns that the whole saga took.
You will recall that during the McCarthy conversations, and as the compass ultimately found Schottenheimer, that the name Jason Witten kept being reported by various insiders as someone who could potentially be a candidate. To be fair, Witten’s name was thrown out in multiple capacities: as a reported heir apparent plan for Mike McCarthy and/or as an outright head coaching candidate.
Jason Witten reportedly never spoke to Jerry Jones about a role on the Cowboys staff
As it relates to Jason Witten, there were a lot of reports about his connection to the Cowboys staff in some sort of capacity. If you need a refresher then go look at the coaching tracker we had going on when Dallas was still looking for a main man. There are several mentions of Witten by the most noted NFL insiders in the business.
It is possible that these reports were wrong? Sure. Information can get mishandled or whatever else can happen. Something apparently did happen, given that according to Jason Witten, he never spoke to Jerry Jones about a role on the Cowboys staff.
“I did not talk to Jerry about it,” Witten said at the award ceremony for the Jason Witten Collegiate Man of the Year award. “I think they went through a thorough process for them and got to a place where they felt like Brian was the guy.”
Eventually, coaching at the professional level is something that Witten wants to do, and doing it for the Cowboys would be something he’s interested in.
“Of course that’s a long term goal of mine one day to get back there when the right opportunity comes…” Witten said. “When the right time and the right opportunity comes, I’m excited to embark on that next chapter.”
Witten is certainly worth believing at his word. It is interesting though, given how much smoke was surrounding the situation that he didn’t talk to Jerry about it at all.
It stands to reason that somebody was pushing Witten’s name through all of the reporting of the top insiders as noted. Maybe that was Jerry. Maybe it was somebody else with the Cowboys. Maybe the insiders went rogue. Obviously, again, anything is possible.
For now, it appears that this story is closed, in this sense at least.
