If Michael Irvin had been in charge of the coaching search for the Dallas Cowboys, it’s safe to say that he would NOT have selected Brian Schottenheimer, who was hired as the team’s new head coach on Friday night.
Irvin took to his YouTube channel on Saturday to talk about the new hire and he definitely did not sound happy about the situation. The former Cowboys star called out Jerry Jones for whiffing on a big opportunity with the hire.
“Here’s my issue: We lost an opportunity here,” Irvin said. “I don’t know what will happen with Coach Schottenheimer and the Dallas Cowboys, but Jerry’s a shrewd, shrewd businessman, and this opportunity, I’m shocked he did not see.”
Irvin pointed out that two NFC East teams will be playing in the NFC Championship on Sunday, which is a round of the playoffs that the Cowboys haven’t made it to since 1995.
“We have two NFC East teams in the NFC Championship game being played [Sunday], all eyes on them,” Irvin said. “The Philadelphia Eagles and the Washington Commanders, our enemies on all fronts, and they’re in a position that we haven’t held in 30 f—ing years. The longest drought by any NFC East team, period.”
The Commanders did hold the record for longest active drought without appearing in an NFC Championship, but that unfortunate honor now belongs to the Cowboys. Before this year, the Commanders hadn’t made it to the game since 1991. With Washington getting there this year, though, that means every NFC team has made it to the conference title game at least once since 2010, except for the Cowboys.
Due to their ongoing struggles, Irvin says the Cowboys might actually start losing fans.
“They’ve lost a generation of fans,” Irvin said. “That’s 30 damn years. Forty years is a generation. Right here, right now was critical mass. It was time to bring somebody in here that could shake things up and grab this last leg of Cowboys Nation.”
With the Cowboys viewed as “America’s Team,” Jones probably hasn’t been worried about losing fans, but it’s something that he should start taking seriously, according to Irvin.
“If we got 30 years right now, life expectancy is 100 years, that means by math, a third of Cowboys nation has never felt or lived the glory of a championship story, don’t even know about it,” Irvin said. “How the hell can they pass something down if they don’t even know about it? It’s a generation that knows nothing about a championship from the so-called ‘America’s Team’. … And worse yet, that generation has seen total domination from a team named the Kansas City Chiefs.”
With the Chiefs gunning for to make NFL history by becoming the first team to win three Super Bowls in a row, Irvin admitted they might steal the Cowboys’ title of “America’s Team.”
“Not only are you losing football games over here, and opportunities over here, even divisions over here, you’re about to get our moniker snatched off our backs,” Irvin said.
If Irvin had been in charge of the coaching hire, there’s no question who he would have picked: Deion Sanders.
“I was pushing for Deion Sanders to be the next head coach, and I still stand ten toes down on that push,” Irvin said.
Irvin had been pushing for Jones to hire Coach Prime for several months, but Jones clearly didn’t listen to the former Cowboys star.
At the minimum, Irvin wanted to see the Cowboys hire a coach with some actual head coaching experience, which Schottenheimer doesn’t have. The 51-year-old has never been a head coach in the NFL despite 24 years of experience as an assistant coach in the league.
“The Raiders hired Pete Carroll, he had some experience,” Irvin said. “Last time, when we did Mike McCarthy, he had some experience. I got to slap myself and say, ‘Give it a chance, at least they walked the walk already.’ Brian hadn’t walked no walk.”
Irvin isn’t the only former Cowboys receiver who wasn’t thrilled with the hire. Dez Bryant also seemed perplexed by the decision. Shortly after the announcement was made on Friday night, Bryant reacted with four interesting words followed by an “smh.”
When you’re using a word like “sabotage” to describe a coaching hire, that almost certainly means you’re not on board with it, so it’s pretty clear that Bryant would have liked to see the Cowboys go a different route.
With the way that Jones is running things in Dallas, Bryant added that he doesn’t feel like there will be “success anytime soon.”
Bryant, who spent nine seasons in Dallas, knows the organization well, so it’s worth listening to what he has to say and he thinks that Jones needs to modernize his thinking.
He also offered some advice on how that can happen: “Somebody in the organization needs to step up and tell Jerry that the old ways of thinking don’t exist in this new era,” Bryant wrote on X.
Now, if you’re going to rip a coaching decision, it’s only fair that you point out someone who would have been a better candidate and Bryant actually did that BACK IN NOVEMBER. Two months ago, Bryant said that if the Cowboys wanted to turn things around, they needed to “steal” Kliff Kingsbury from the Commanders.
Again, Bryant wrote that in November, and it’s a tweet that looks especially smart now with the Commanders getting set to play in the NFC Championship against the Eagles.
Bryant wanted Kingsbury and Irvin wanted Deion and neither of them wanted Schottenheimer.
So will the Cowboys be able to end their NFC title drought anytime soon? Bryant definitely sounds pessimistic about things at this point. Two weeks ago, he told Cowboys fans they “should not expect success soon,” and with Jones making a coaching hire that Bryant doesn’t seem to agree with, the former receiver probably doesn’t have high expectations for the Cowboys going forward.
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