Norv Turner Era: Success or Failure?

[sportscurmudgeon]

Here's a comment I made in my Internet column today about the Cowboys' coaching search:



With all the attention and focus on the Cowboys’ coaching search, there is an obvious solution to filling their vacancy – but it is one fraught with danger for the league. Jerry Jones could name himself as the coach of the Cowboys. Hey, George Halas and Paul Brown were rather successful “owner/coaches”; Al Davis coached the Raiders for a while and he’s the moral equivalent of an “owner”. Jones is already the Cowboys’ owner, CEO, President and GM; he spends half the game on the sidelines anyway; he played college football; he can certainly do well in the job interview event. It’s a way to increase the team’s profitability since he won’t need to pay a head coach something in the neighborhood of $4-5M per year. And can he really do that much worse than Dave Campo did?

Here’s the danger for the league… If he does this and the team breaks even next year, it will set up a grand machismo situation for other owners. Follow this line of thought. Hey, if JJ can do it – and Al Davis did it before – why can’t I do it too? It’ll mean more face time for me on TV and if the team wins I won’t have to share the spotlight with some flunky that I was smart enough to hire in the first place; all that jamoke did was do what I paid him millions of dollars to do. And with that thinking – I can’t bring myself to call it reasoning – you could see Danny Boy Snyder prowling the sidelines for the Washington Redskins. Talk about putting one of the longstanding franchises into a tailspin…