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It didn’t take long for Jerry Jones to turn the Dallas Cowboys’ head coach search into a circus.
Perhaps that’s just how he likes it. In the middle of the NFL playoffs, with the Cowboys long out of the postseason picture, up pops Jones to push his team back to the top of the news agenda.
The Cowboys moved on from coach Mike McCarthy after the two sides failed to agree to a long-term contract extension they spent a month trying to hash out. That leaves Jones looking for his seventh head coach since the Cowboys last won a Super Bowl, 29 years ago.
Enter Deion Sanders. Hours after the Cowboys let McCarthy go, ESPN reported that Jones had reached out to Sanders, the Hall of Fame player turned college football’s most electrifying personality.
A realistic option? A pipedream? A sideshow? Who knows. But the idea of Sanders leaving college football to take a crack at the NFL is tantalizing.
“To hear from Jerry Jones is truly delightful, and it’s intriguing,” Sanders told ESPN on Monday. “I love Jerry and believe in Jerry. After you hang up, and process it, and think about it, it’s intriguing. But I love Boulder and everything there is about our team, the coaches, our student body and the community.”
Sanders has no reason to leave Colorado. He has the Buffs rolling, and finished his second season 9-4, with a Heisman Trophy winner and one of the top recruiting classes in the country on its way for next season. But read between the lines, and the statement starts to read something like this: I want the job, but I don’t want to be left at the altar if the Cowboys turn elsewhere.
Picking Sanders makes some sense. He is a Cowboys legend, having played five seasons with the franchise and won one Super Bowl. He is also a football genius and a master marketer, proving his coaching chops as a coach at the collegiate level. At Jackson State, he turned a dilapidated program into a contender, attracting the No 1 overall recruit in the country, Travis Hunter, to an HBCU. At Colorado, he has turned one of the most moribund football programs in a power conference into a conference championship contender in two seasons.
It’s no wonder, then, that Sanders is on Jones’s mind. He is part of the Cowboys family, and if we know anything about Jones, it’s that he views the Cowboys not as America’s Team but as the Jones family enterprise.
Still, targeting a coach with no NFL coaching experience is a stretch for a team with playoff ambitions. The history of college coaches making the jump is shaky at best. It’s also not the way Jones has operated. For all the stardust of the Cowboys, he’s spent the latter stages of his tenure hiring steady hands with little pizazz. Making a big splash for Sanders would break that mold.
Whether Sanders is genuinely interested in the job is more intriguing.
“The only way I would consider [coaching in the NFL] is to coach my sons,” Sanders told Good Morning America this month.
Sanders has never coached a season of football without his youngest son, Shedeur, as his quarterback. Together, they have put up a 33-14 record, with half of those losses coming in the first year of their Colorado rebuild. Sanders will probably be a first-round pick in the upcoming draft – and could be the first quarterback off the board. Shilo Sanders, a safety at Colorado and Deion’s eldest son, is a fringe draft prospect.
Bringing back a former star player turned budding coach with his talented son is a romantic ideal. There is a scenario in which Sanders’ charisma and intellect provide a spark to an unremarkable roster, lifting the Cowboys back into championship contention. But the pesky facts blur the romantic appeal. Dallas recently signed quarterback Dak Prescott to a four-year, $240m contract extension. That extension hasn’t even kicked in yet, making moving on from Prescott this offseason in favor of a new coach and his son a near impossibility. The Cowboys could engineer a move up in the draft to try to select Shedeur Sanders, but the cost (in draft capital and cash) would be steep. Cutting Prescott this offseason would cost the Cowboys $104m in dead cap money, around 38% of the projected salary cap. Prescott also has a no-trade clause, meaning he would have to sign off on any deal while the Cowboys would still be on the hook for the eye-watering salary cap charge.
Any argument that Jones will eat the cash to execute a grand vision rings hollow given that he has been skimping on money for years. The Cowboys look and talk rich, but their true cash spend has tapered off as the 82-year-old Jones has aged. If there is something Jones hates more than losing, it’s paying people to work elsewhere. The Cowboys routinely have the lowest dead cap total in the league, limiting their roster flexibility. Part of the reason why McCarthy’s contract was allowed to expire, was that Jones did not want to sign him to an extension and then be saddled with a hefty payout if he ultimately decided to fire the coach.
Let’s say Dallas do pull off an audacious move for Shedeur Sanders. Is it worth taking a job with the league’s most famous/infamous franchise and concocting a move to coach your son again, if it winds up detonating your ability to put a competitive team on the field?
Even if coaching his sons is Coach Prime’s main priority, then there are easier avenues. The Raiders, for one, have a job vacancy, the No 6 pick in the draft and need a quarterback.
Perhaps Sanders would be happy to coach the Cowboys without Shedeur. Maybe the Cowboys feel the Sanders family could finagle an Eli Manning-like move, telling the 31 other franchises not to select Shedeur. But those thought exercises put us in gaga land. Betting on an unproven coach and his son as a rookie quarterback – with all the locker room resentment that could foster in the pros – sounds like an idea for a Peacock spin-off series. It’s not the way a team with true Super Bowl aspirations should operate.
And it would not resolve Dallas’ biggest problem: Jones.
Even in his 80s, Jones is still intent on being the face of the Cowboys franchise. After every game, he wanders into the corridor outside the locker room to deliver impromptu press conferences. If you miss those soundbites, there he is on his weekly radio appearance, undermining his coaching staff. Jones, the franchise’s general manager as well as the owner, doesn’t just want to run things; he wants to be seen to run things. He wants to be heard – and you had best be listening, his staff included.
The insularity of the Cowboys will have candidates looking sideways at what should be a destination spot. The quarterback is in place. They can manipulate the salary cap to make moves in free agency – if Jones is willing to open up his sizable checkbook. With Micah Parsons, CeeDee Lamb and Tyler Smith, there are stars on the roster, even if the depth is questionable. Compare that situation with what is on offer from the Raiders, Bears, Jaguars, or Saints and it’s not particularly close. But those franchises are not tied to the whims of Jerry Jones.
Maybe that’s where Sanders makes sense. He is one of the few people with the football and cultural cache to stand up to Jones’s way of doing things. He may not be able to call time on Jones’s public prognostications, but Sanders’s magnetism would give Jones’s views less oxygen. He will still bark, but Sanders will shrug it off with a smile. It would probably devolve into a farce, but Sanders has proved adept enough at the media game to ride out pointless, energy-sapping storms.
There are other candidates besides Sanders. Eagles offensive coordinator Kellen Moore would be a shiny fallback plan. Like Sanders, Moore has been in the Cowboys Mafia, working as the team’s quarterback coach and offensive coordinator from 2018 to 2022, the most successful years of Prescott’s career.
Outside Moore, though, the list is small – and it doesn’t inspire confidence. The Cowboys have interviewed Jason Witten, the former Cowboys tight end, who has no coaching experience. They have also requested to interview former Jets head coach Robert Saleh. But by letting the McCarthy situation drag on for two weeks, the Cowboys removed themselves from the early round of interviews with the league’s top candidates. They missed the window to interview Detroit’s Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn, the two hottest coordinators on the market. Mike Vrabel, the top available free agent on the market, had already accepted the Patriots job before Jones finally let McCarthy go.
Taking on Jones and the Cowboys will not be for everyone. Coaches are control freaks. They want a say. They want their voice to be the loudest. But in Dallas, it’s Jerry’s World.
That’s the upside with Sanders: his voice will drown out Jones, if not sideline the owner. By chasing a glamor name, Jones would no longer be able to drown out a placid coach. That, more than anything, would be a win for the Cowboys.
Sanders is not the cleanest fit. But the cleanest fit is not always available. Until Jones steps aside, Dallas will not be a landing sport for an in-demand coach. Given Sanders’s football acumen and personality, pairing him with Jones might just be crazy enough to work.
