Bluestang
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GM
A legitimate general manager should be the most experienced personnel guy in the front office. Period. He is ultimately responsible for the roster every season, good or bad. It does go without saying, he does take input from the scouts and coaches but he is the decision maker on whether the players makes the roster or is sent packing. In an interview on the radio with Hostile, Ted Sundquist also confirmed some things that some people may or may not know. The Head Coach plays an important role within the team, building it the way he envisions with help from the GM. Don't get confused here by thinking that the HC is the ultimate architect of the roster, but more like the construction foreman telling the engineer that he needs certain materials in order to build the structure from the blueprints. Which leads to me the HC position.
HC
The head coach should have some legitimate experience coaching, and should have success doing it. There should be a natural progression of coaching experience that shows a track record of proven success as a means of substantiating why that coach is a candidate for the job. The GM should be hiring a coach that he feels will make the team a winner within the talents of the roster. Of course though, the GM must be able to help the HC accomplish the overall goals by giving him what he needs to make his offensive/defensive schemes successful. I believe this is the most single important relationship within the front office structure that determines the success of the ball club. Plenty of us have seen how these relationships can crumble and then lead to a "house cleaning" within the organization.
OC/DC
These positions should be filled with the recommendation of the HC, because ultimately it is the HC that wants these guys to run his schemes on both sides of the ball. Just like the HC position, these guys should have a natural coaching progression and success doing it.
Owner
This is probably the hardest position to write about because so little is known about it. The owner is the one guy that everyone within the front office answers to, because he signs the checks. The GM can't sign a highly, prized FA without getting approval from the owner because of the type of money that is involved with that kind of transaction. And there in lies the biggest conflict within the front office structure, how does a GM build a team with the owner's money if the owner is the guy that approves/disapproves the transaction?
Look at the marquee franchises and you'll see that the owners have an important relationship with their GMs and they give them as much leeway as they financially can to make their team a winner without putting themselves at the forefront. There is a special relationship there, and it has to be so that a GM can be successful. Handcuff the GM at every turn, and that trickles down all the way to the type of players that will be on the roster.
So why did I write this all out? Well, a few reasons:
1. I used to support JG when he first took the reins and up until last year. I thought we were headed in the right direction. Despite the evidence to the contrary, I believed he could do it. But after seeing him lose to every NFC East opponent 3 years straight, and still making game management blunders there isn't good reasons for me to rationalize his tenure here. I strongly said, give him 3 years and that time has come and gone and now we have a team that is heavily, scaled towards the offense with nothing on defense.
2. Despite what may be perceived on the recent drafting of this team, I've come to conclusion that this team still doesn't recognize how to build a team from the draft. Sure we have Tyron Smith and Dez Bryant but who else is there? We trade away valuable picks to get one player when we should be staying put or trading down for value. You can argue that we built a *projected top 5 OL but at what expense? We now have a franchise QB with back injury concerns because we tried to go cheap on the OL the first time around and had him running around for his life. And don't even bring up Claiborne who has proved nothing for what we spent on him in that 2012 draft. Murray is another good argument, but with this OL just about any running back should be able to get 1000+ yds and double digit TDs. Which brings me to my final point about the defense. Where have we invested in the defense? Yea we had some probowl players in Ware, Spencer, Hatcher, and Ratliff but it's obvious that the front office didn't have any sort of plan if those guys got injured/cut/not-resigned. Good GMs build their rosters with that kind of thinking in mind, and Dallas kept think that these players would still produce at high levels or shake the injuries as they kept getting older. Why not a second rounder on DL instead of Gavin Escobar? Or stay put in 2012 and get Brockers and Wagner?
3. This Owner/GM relationship here in Dallas is the worst kind. They are the same guy and he's a lunatic at that. However, there were 2 coaches that were able to keep Jerry from being Jerry. Jason, despite the arguments that he can, has not been able to keep the owner from saying those detrimental things. Jason has been called a trainee multiple times, has had to deal with Jerry's antics on the sideline, and also the War Room incompetence. The other aspect is that JG never had success in his offense outside of 2007 when he had help with it. There wasn't a natural progression with his coaching that warranted his promotion because his offense was just as bad as the defense in 2010 when Wade got fired. You can see that JG is working within the confines of his GM, but because of our unique situation in Dallas with the owner/GM we have to have a HC that doesn't put up with Jerry's nonsense.
4. A lot of people see hope in Stephen Jones, but he's still just as bad as Jerry. Some people will credit Stephen with his contracts but the reality is that he is as bad they come. The constant restructures are what have put this team in cap salary hell, despite what Stephen publicly says, they haven't been able to "do whatever they want" in FA. They bargain bin shopped for OL, the last few years and they kept adding more dead money to future years with restructures because they had to get under the cap. Folks this is the equivalent of paying your debt with a credit card and shuffling it around until you finally have to pay that original amount. These poor financial decisions are not any sort of resume that says Stephen is better than his daddy. The Bengals just handed Andy Dalton a new $96M contract with only $17M guaranteed. That means if they decided to cut him after this year, he would only count $9.6M against them in dead money next year. In that amount keeps going down $2.4M every year after that. That is a damn good contract that puts the onus on the player to keep producing. Yep, the Bengals are better contract negotiators than Dallas is.
Took a long, hard look at how Dallas is organized, or rightly so unorganized. There is a Owner, a GM, a HC, and OC/DCs but none of them have any type of hierarchy that follows each other. There is no offensive/defensive identity whatsoever and the GM, whoever that is - Jerry, Tom Ciscowski, or McClay - are not the most experienced personnel evaluators within the organization.
That's why one coach only had success in Jerry's tenure and another completely changed the landscape of a team in a mudslide.
I saw that familiar look in Jason's face in the preseason game in SD. It's the same one he had when the GB game got away from him, and the same one that Mike Smith had looking at his defense last night in preseason too.
It's the look of man that "hopes" things will turn out well, but they rarely do.
We'll see how this turns out but the defense can certainly get worse, and there are a lot of us that certainly believe that it will. The SD game didn't put those thoughts/confirmations to rest and quite frankly it shouldn't. The depth is lousy, and the scheme looks unorganized at best. I understand that 2 out of the four DL were not playing and Crawford was playing out of position, but in the limited action he was in...he did meh. The rest were over matched and got manhandled at the POA.
Again you have guys like Nick Hayden on this team because the front office can't afford a FA or draft a replacement because of the reasons I posted above.
This franchise will continue to wallow in mediocrity until we have head coach that can have Jerry "walking on eggshells" and keep him out of the personnel evaluation process.
Who will be the next Johnson or Parcells?
A legitimate general manager should be the most experienced personnel guy in the front office. Period. He is ultimately responsible for the roster every season, good or bad. It does go without saying, he does take input from the scouts and coaches but he is the decision maker on whether the players makes the roster or is sent packing. In an interview on the radio with Hostile, Ted Sundquist also confirmed some things that some people may or may not know. The Head Coach plays an important role within the team, building it the way he envisions with help from the GM. Don't get confused here by thinking that the HC is the ultimate architect of the roster, but more like the construction foreman telling the engineer that he needs certain materials in order to build the structure from the blueprints. Which leads to me the HC position.
HC
The head coach should have some legitimate experience coaching, and should have success doing it. There should be a natural progression of coaching experience that shows a track record of proven success as a means of substantiating why that coach is a candidate for the job. The GM should be hiring a coach that he feels will make the team a winner within the talents of the roster. Of course though, the GM must be able to help the HC accomplish the overall goals by giving him what he needs to make his offensive/defensive schemes successful. I believe this is the most single important relationship within the front office structure that determines the success of the ball club. Plenty of us have seen how these relationships can crumble and then lead to a "house cleaning" within the organization.
OC/DC
These positions should be filled with the recommendation of the HC, because ultimately it is the HC that wants these guys to run his schemes on both sides of the ball. Just like the HC position, these guys should have a natural coaching progression and success doing it.
Owner
This is probably the hardest position to write about because so little is known about it. The owner is the one guy that everyone within the front office answers to, because he signs the checks. The GM can't sign a highly, prized FA without getting approval from the owner because of the type of money that is involved with that kind of transaction. And there in lies the biggest conflict within the front office structure, how does a GM build a team with the owner's money if the owner is the guy that approves/disapproves the transaction?
Look at the marquee franchises and you'll see that the owners have an important relationship with their GMs and they give them as much leeway as they financially can to make their team a winner without putting themselves at the forefront. There is a special relationship there, and it has to be so that a GM can be successful. Handcuff the GM at every turn, and that trickles down all the way to the type of players that will be on the roster.
So why did I write this all out? Well, a few reasons:
1. I used to support JG when he first took the reins and up until last year. I thought we were headed in the right direction. Despite the evidence to the contrary, I believed he could do it. But after seeing him lose to every NFC East opponent 3 years straight, and still making game management blunders there isn't good reasons for me to rationalize his tenure here. I strongly said, give him 3 years and that time has come and gone and now we have a team that is heavily, scaled towards the offense with nothing on defense.
2. Despite what may be perceived on the recent drafting of this team, I've come to conclusion that this team still doesn't recognize how to build a team from the draft. Sure we have Tyron Smith and Dez Bryant but who else is there? We trade away valuable picks to get one player when we should be staying put or trading down for value. You can argue that we built a *projected top 5 OL but at what expense? We now have a franchise QB with back injury concerns because we tried to go cheap on the OL the first time around and had him running around for his life. And don't even bring up Claiborne who has proved nothing for what we spent on him in that 2012 draft. Murray is another good argument, but with this OL just about any running back should be able to get 1000+ yds and double digit TDs. Which brings me to my final point about the defense. Where have we invested in the defense? Yea we had some probowl players in Ware, Spencer, Hatcher, and Ratliff but it's obvious that the front office didn't have any sort of plan if those guys got injured/cut/not-resigned. Good GMs build their rosters with that kind of thinking in mind, and Dallas kept think that these players would still produce at high levels or shake the injuries as they kept getting older. Why not a second rounder on DL instead of Gavin Escobar? Or stay put in 2012 and get Brockers and Wagner?
3. This Owner/GM relationship here in Dallas is the worst kind. They are the same guy and he's a lunatic at that. However, there were 2 coaches that were able to keep Jerry from being Jerry. Jason, despite the arguments that he can, has not been able to keep the owner from saying those detrimental things. Jason has been called a trainee multiple times, has had to deal with Jerry's antics on the sideline, and also the War Room incompetence. The other aspect is that JG never had success in his offense outside of 2007 when he had help with it. There wasn't a natural progression with his coaching that warranted his promotion because his offense was just as bad as the defense in 2010 when Wade got fired. You can see that JG is working within the confines of his GM, but because of our unique situation in Dallas with the owner/GM we have to have a HC that doesn't put up with Jerry's nonsense.
4. A lot of people see hope in Stephen Jones, but he's still just as bad as Jerry. Some people will credit Stephen with his contracts but the reality is that he is as bad they come. The constant restructures are what have put this team in cap salary hell, despite what Stephen publicly says, they haven't been able to "do whatever they want" in FA. They bargain bin shopped for OL, the last few years and they kept adding more dead money to future years with restructures because they had to get under the cap. Folks this is the equivalent of paying your debt with a credit card and shuffling it around until you finally have to pay that original amount. These poor financial decisions are not any sort of resume that says Stephen is better than his daddy. The Bengals just handed Andy Dalton a new $96M contract with only $17M guaranteed. That means if they decided to cut him after this year, he would only count $9.6M against them in dead money next year. In that amount keeps going down $2.4M every year after that. That is a damn good contract that puts the onus on the player to keep producing. Yep, the Bengals are better contract negotiators than Dallas is.
Took a long, hard look at how Dallas is organized, or rightly so unorganized. There is a Owner, a GM, a HC, and OC/DCs but none of them have any type of hierarchy that follows each other. There is no offensive/defensive identity whatsoever and the GM, whoever that is - Jerry, Tom Ciscowski, or McClay - are not the most experienced personnel evaluators within the organization.
That's why one coach only had success in Jerry's tenure and another completely changed the landscape of a team in a mudslide.
I saw that familiar look in Jason's face in the preseason game in SD. It's the same one he had when the GB game got away from him, and the same one that Mike Smith had looking at his defense last night in preseason too.
It's the look of man that "hopes" things will turn out well, but they rarely do.
We'll see how this turns out but the defense can certainly get worse, and there are a lot of us that certainly believe that it will. The SD game didn't put those thoughts/confirmations to rest and quite frankly it shouldn't. The depth is lousy, and the scheme looks unorganized at best. I understand that 2 out of the four DL were not playing and Crawford was playing out of position, but in the limited action he was in...he did meh. The rest were over matched and got manhandled at the POA.
Again you have guys like Nick Hayden on this team because the front office can't afford a FA or draft a replacement because of the reasons I posted above.
This franchise will continue to wallow in mediocrity until we have head coach that can have Jerry "walking on eggshells" and keep him out of the personnel evaluation process.
Who will be the next Johnson or Parcells?
