Blogging The Boys
The Dallas Cowboys have not reached the playoffs in the first year of a new head coach since 2007.
It is hard to objectively say what would constitute as a successful season for the 2025 Dallas Cowboys. This franchise has been living in a shadow that only continues to grow for the past 30 years so. While we all want to see it put to an end, just making the playoffs on some level would feel like serious progress.
That statement obviously involves some context and even more is necessary to figure out what success or playoff probabilities are like for this year’s version of the team. Given that they have a new head coach in Brian Schottenheimer that obviously plays a role, as does the fact that Schotty has never been a head coach before.
Schottenheimer is the 10th head coach in Cowboys history and looking at the first years of each one is interesting, but also something that has to be taken with a grain of salt. Different head coaches have taken over the team at different points. Rosters were in different shapes and the state of the league was different. We cannot compare them all apples to apples.
Let’s do our best to remember that.
Understanding that different circumstances have surrounded each coach in franchise history during their first season, you should know that four of the previous nine reached the postseason in their initial campaign.
Consider things like Tom Landry starting with an entirely brand new franchise or Mike McCarthy navigating life amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Needless to say that there are variables they each saw as different challenges.
Only Switzer, Gailey, Parcells and Phillips reached the playoffs in their first seasons leading the Cowboys. Of those four only Switzer won a playoff game, although Phillips should get some credit for leading a team to a first-round bye.
Looking at this list a little bit differently, it features six of the nine who took the Cowboys job with no previous NFL head coaching experience. The outliers in that sense are/were Parcells, Phillips and McCarthy.
It feels unfair to remove Parcells and Phillips from the discussion because they took over the Cowboys after having been head coaches before, but given that Schottenheimer hasn’t it is worth having the discussion out loud. This means that only two head coaches in franchise history who took the post under similar circumstances from an experience standpoint to Schottenheimer navigated the team to the playoffs in that...
