Wade Phillips Fired!

[Omniscient]

I think results might be less of a measure than preparedness and professionalism are. Under Wade they were a sloppy, lazy, poorly mannered team and I suspect practices were a joke. If Garrett fixes that and eliminates the mistakes and gets some of these prima donnas to care he’ll have done yeoman’s work even if Kitna submarines the final result.

ETA: Incidentally, Kitna is better than probably 6 other QBs in the league right now. If Palmer and McNabb continue imploding he might pass them up too.

[crypto]

@Omniscient

I think results might be less of a measure than preparedness and professionalism are. Under Wade they were a sloppy, lazy, poorly mannered team and I suspect practices were a joke. If Garrett fixes that and eliminates the mistakes and gets some of these prima donnas to care he’ll have done yeoman’s work even if Kitna submarines the final result.

You might be right, but I honestly don’t thin Garrett has a prayer of changing the culture there. Everyone knows who really calls the shots in Dallas. And Jerry is not a guy who likes to hear “no”. So, my guess is that Garrett will be measured on how he works with the BOSS, and if he can’t take orders from Jones, it will be bye-bye Jason. But the players? The season is over, so there will be little incentive to listen to Garrett. Maybe they win 2 games the rest of the way, but big deal. Garrett needs to do much better than that. I suspect though, that Garrett will be back no matter what he does this year. Jones will not be able to land that big name coach during the off-season, so he’ll go back to Garrett when the time is appropriate.

I don’t see any big name coach working for Jerry Jones. Jerry just can’t help himself, and he’s proven that over the past 2 decades. But, he is rich, it’s his team, and he can do with it what he pleases.

I have always wondered how many SB’s the Cowboys would have won if Jones butted out and let Jimmy Johnson do his thing. Thank goodness he got rid of Jimmy!

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@SCSimmons

New fun questions: Phillips was the DefCor, and Garrett the OffCor. I can’t imagine that Jones will let Garrett wear two hats in his first HC gig, they way he let the experienced Phillips … So, who will step up to run the offense and defense?

Former Syracuse head coach and Dolphins defensive coordinator Paul Pasqualoni (currently the Cowboys’ DC) will take over the defense.

He was a very good coach at Syracuse (he recruited Donovan McNabb and won a Fiesta Bowl, among other things), and a pretty bad one at Miami; the Dolphins finished 15th and 22nd in total defense in his two years, and he was fired this past offseason.

@Omniscient

I made this exact argument in the Week 9 thread. I never really understood why all the pundits seemed to think firing Wade was a bad idea. They all agreed he was done but they all said that firing him wouldn’t improve things either.

The argument against firing him was that because he was the defensive coordinator, they would have nobody to call defensive plays. Considering the team is second-to-last in the league in scoring defense, I fail to see why that would have been an issue; they would probably have done better running their base defense on every play.

[astorian]

Speaking as a Giants fan who doesn’t hate the Cowboys (I only have X amount of hatred in my heart, and the Eagles take up 95% of it)…

I think Wade Phillips is a decent guy, a very good defensive coordinator (he built a championship caliber defense in San Diego), and a halfway decent head coach (has anybody else gotten the Buffalo Bills to the playoffs lately?). No, he wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of my lift of great coaches, but he’s a solid football man.

Remember that Wade Phillips didn’t seek out the Cowboys’ head coaching job, and didn’t know he was being considered for it! Jerry Jones did everything backwards after the departure of Bill Parcells. He hired Jason Garrett to run the offense and Wade Phillips to run the defense, and only THEN started to look for a head coach! Naturally, no capable, desirable candidate would accept a head coaching job in which he didn’t even get to choose his own assistants, so Jerry was stuck. SOMEBODY had to be given the title of head coach, so he gave the title to Wade Phillips! I strongly suspected Jerry WANTED to give the title to Garrett, the media strongly suspected the same thing, and the players did too. EVERYONE believed Wade was just a figurehead with no real power, and that he was just holding the job until Jason Garrett got a little more seasoning.

Under the circumstances, Wade Phillips COULDN’T succeed. He COULDN’T command respect in the locker room because he wasn’t really in charge of squat, and every player knew it. A lot of fans kept saying, “Wade is too nice, he needs to crack the whip.” But even if he’d WANTED to get tough, how could he? No player would have taken him seriously, because every player knew that, if conflicts arose, he could go over Wade’s head and talk to Jerry Jones, and the jock-sniffing Jones would side with the player.

The Cowboys DO have a lot of talent (though not as much as many people assume), and the right coach COULD make them successful. But the right coach (be it Cowher or Gruden or Jim Harbaugh or whoever) won’t take a job in which he isn’t really in control of the team.

As for Wade, I hope he gets another chance to be a defensive coordinator, and that he gets to remind everyone how capable he is.