It became clear early in the 2025 season that the Cowboys would need to overhaul their defense this offseason and the first big step in that process was the move to hire Christian Parker as their new defensive coordinator.
Parker got a chance to lay out some of his approach during a press conference on Wednesday. One of the questions he faced was how quickly he thinks he’ll be able to turn around a unit that allowed the most points in the league last year and Parker declined to put any timetable on how long it will take to rebuild the unit.
“I don’t think we want to put any expectations on it in that regard,” Parker said. “I think we just want to kind of take it day by day and do it the right way. So, we’re kind of just taking that approach. We’ll get our head out of the sand at some point, but right now we got tunnel vision on doing things the right way.”
One of the criticisms of last year’s defense was that previous coordinator Matt Eberflus didn’t build his scheme around the skills of the players on hand. Parker said that stopping the run and affecting the quarterback are the pillars of any defense, but that he’s not beholden to any particular way of making that happen.
“I think you build it around the players,” Parker said. “Of course, you want to have your core principles and foundational beliefs. But, as you kind of move forward in the process, what do your guys do well? How can you put players in highlighted positions, create one-on-ones for certain guys? How can you protect certain guys? If we can win on blitzs on a running back, then we’re going to blitz a lot. If we got good man-to-man corners, we’re going to play man. If we’re better than zone vision, we’ll play more zone. You want to build a package that has diversity in scheme and then you want to tailor it to the players you have.”
The identity of all of those players won’t be known for some time, but the hope in Dallas is that Parker can mold any group into a more effective one than the Cowboys put on the field last year.
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