To this point, the Dallas Cowboys’ coaching search has been each of the following: maddeningly insular, underwhelming and, in a hollow sort of way, attention grabbing in the vein of New York City’s Naked Cowboy or a miniature social media craze about cooking your chicken in laundry detergent (fun to look at, impossible to take seriously, instantly forgettable).
And while Jerry Jones has never been one to take common sense advice—Derrick Henry would like to say hello—here’s a quick primer on how to save this coaching search that’s small enough to fit on a notecard: Hire Kliff Kingsbury the minute the Washington Commanders are knocked out of the playoffs or win the Super Bowl.
I’ll address what I imagine will be the responses from skeptics on both sides of the argument.
First: Why on earth would Kingsbury want the Cowboys’ job?
While it’s true that Kingsbury has what we’d all imagine is a dream job calling plays for the presumptive offensive rookie of the year in Jayden Daniels, and Daniels is a fabulous football player with an incredibly bright future, the truth is that we simply cannot project ahead. Ben Johnson miraculously maintained the interest of teams over three different head coach hiring cycles. Other “hot” offensive coordinators attached to talented rookie quarterbacks have learned the hard way that progress is not always a neat and tidy ascension. For example, I imagine Houston Texans offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik is still as good of a play-caller as the coach who had a handful of interviews last year. Injuries, and the overall performance of C.J. Stroud, though, will likely force Slowik to wait for another opportunity.
Kingsbury knows as well as anyone about capitalizing on a moment. During a very brief period of time in which the Air Raid was buzzy thanks to Patrick Mahomes and so, too, was any connection to Sean McVay, Kingsbury went from fired head coach at Texas Tech to head coach of the Arizona Cardinals. At any other time in football history, Kingsbury would have likely had to work his way back up through the collegiate coordinator pipeline.
Also, despite what dolts like me are writing on a daily basis, there are still plenty of people who would want to work for Jones and coach the Dallas Cowboys. I would assume that includes Kingsbury, who was born in San Antonio, is a member of the Texas High School Football Hall of Fame and spent 10 years coaching at the University of Houston, Texas A&M and Texas Tech. To bolster that point, Kingsbury works for someone who really seems to have enjoyed his time with Jones.
Here’s a snippet of a conversation I had with Commanders head coach Dan Quinn back in August:
“When I left Dallas, Jerry Jones pulled me aside and said, ‘[Washington] is a really important franchise.’ He knew from competing against them through all those years, he said that I’d find the community would go crazy for me. Jerry said, ‘You’re the right guy for that job, for that city, the NFL needs Washington and Washington needs the NFL.’”
Quinn continued: “It was just cool for [Jerry], a Hall of Fame owner, GM, to say that it was the right spot for me, to go kick ass. It was nice to hear that from his perspective, as an old head, to say, ‘Hey, man, it’s a cool place.’”
We can get into an entirely different discussion later about how hilarious it is that Jones, who loved Quinn but opted to instead keep Mike McCarthy, only to fire him a year later and watch Quinn rumble to the conference title game with the Commanders. But for now, we can walk away assured that Quinn holds Jones in high regard, Kingsbury holds Quinn in high regard and, one could assume, Quinn has passed on that regard to Kingsbury.
The second argument: Why should the Cowboys want Kliff Kingsbury?
Certainly, there is a hive of Kingsbury deniers out there who will quickly point out that Kingsbury was 35–40 at Texas Tech and 28-37-1 in Arizona. However, in looking at Kyler Murray’s statistics, there’s no question that Kingsbury has gotten the most out of Arizona’s franchise quarterback to this point.
Removing the rookie season, Murray had a higher total EPA in each of his next two seasons with the Cardinals than Murray had this year in Arizona. He scrambled about the same amount with Kingsbury, took fewer sacks, threw the ball deeper, completed a higher percentage of his passes, threw more touchdowns and was picked about the same amount. When we place Kingsbury against the backdrop of a highly chaotic and mismanaged Cardinals franchise at the time, going from a five-win team in Murray’s rookie year to an 11-win playoff team in Murray’s third year (albeit in a season that was kissed with some superb luck) is impressive.
There’s also the subjective. In my eyes, Kingsbury has evolved into a much different play-caller and designer of an offense than he was when he took the Cardinals’ job. Much like Brian Flores had a breakthrough defensive season by weaponizing the offense’s rules against it, Kingsbury seemed to take a similar approach. Against the Detroit Lions, for example, he could put Daniels in situations where he was better protected but without sacrificing available receiving options. Everything in that game plan, and so many of Daniels’s best moments this year, looked clean. And the reason it looked clean—to me—is that the scheme was just unfamiliar enough, just altered enough to force defenses to second-guess their own rules. Against the Cincinnati Bengals earlier in the season, during a chaotic moment, two of the offense’s wideouts had trouble lining up before the snap but Kingsbury still got Terry McLaurin one on one. Against the Philadelphia Eagles with the game on the line, Kingsbury got a receiver on a linebacker.
And, for sure, there are a ton of moments like the Commanders’ game-winning overtime drive against the Atlanta Falcons where Daniels just negates pressure by being a phenomenal athlete and picking up first downs. He had two critical fourth-down pickups with his legs in Washington’s win over Philly that were straight up superhuman. That’s going to make any play-caller look a little bit better.
The Cowboys, and the football world at large, must have this chicken or egg argument for themselves. I opt for the Tom Brady and Bill Belichick theory, which is that it takes some degree of both coach and player together in order to produce a season like this one.
At this point, taking another chance on Kingsbury seems more attractive than hiring Brian Schottenheimer, the team’s offensive coordinator under McCarthy and now a leading candidate. The Cowboys also interviewed Leslie Frazier and Robert Saleh. If the Cowboys could pair Saleh with Mike LaFleur again (like the New York Jets did before the organization self-imploded), I can promise it would look better with Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb and Micah Parsons than it did with Zach Wilson, Elijah Moore and Braxton Barrios. Saleh, to me, is a highly underrated candidate whose Jets tenure should be placed under the proper context before dismissing him alongside a record. In another year or two, we’re going to be discussing him as a lock for a head coaching job again, even if we should be discussing him that way already.
But if Jones wants a return to winning the battle of optics, if he wants to look aggressive, if he wants to look like he’s concerned with the rise of another divisional foe in Washington and wants to look like he’s doing something about it, Kingsbury offers Jones the ability to pocket a victory at a time when many think he’s gone on autopilot. In my mind, Jones should be more concerned about this than he has been. This hire has a chance to cut off apathy or to feed it.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Why Kliff Kingsbury and the Cowboys are Right for Each Other.