Is Jerry Jones Making Excuses For Brian Schottenheimer After Dallas Cowboys’ Latest Collapse?

Jerry Jones fires back at critics over low coaching pay© Image via: X/@NFL_DovKleiman

Jerry Jones answered the question on his weekly radio spot with a line that fans will be quoting for years, and he did it two days after the Dallas Cowboys threw away a 17-3 third-quarter lead against the Arizona Cardinals. The owner insists that what a team pays its head coach has nothing to do with winning, but Brian Schottenheimer, who earns about $4.5 million a year and ranks near the bottom of the league, is 10-14-1 with a team that stands at 3-5 and has not won a Super Bowl since the 1995 season.

Jerry Jones Defends The Dallas Cowboys' Approach to Paying a Head Coach

Asked on 105.3 The Fan why he usually hires cheaper coaches, Jones did not hedge.

"There is zero correlation (in the NFL) between how much you pay a coach or how many coaches you have as to winning. There is no correlation. And that's a random sample of years and all 32 teams involved. So put that in your hopper and smoke it."

Awful: A Cardinals fan ruthlessly heckled Cowboys owner Jerry Jones as he walked to the locker room in defeat. "Jerry, did you sh*t your pants? Like your team sh*t on the field. I can smell it from here." Jones is 84 years old and deserves respect  https://t.co/Kmcxv9ODaK

— Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) November 3, 2026

He has a point, and his own résumé supplies the best evidence. When Bill Parcells came out of retirement in 2003 for $17.1 million over four years, Dallas jumped from 5-11 to the playoffs, yet Parcells left after the 2005 and 2006 seasons without a deep run. The priciest coach of the Jones era never ended the drought either. Still, Jones offered no data on air, and a league-wide average says little about whether one particular hire at one particular price was a smart bet. Front Office Sports does not list Schottenheimer among the top 20 coaching salaries for 2026.

Brian Schottenheimer Faces Hard Questions As The Dallas Cowboys Slide

Pay is the easy argument. The harder one is that Jones chose a coach he already knew. Schottenheimer ran the Cowboys offense before he replaced Mike McCarthy, so nobody can say the owner hired a stranger and hoped.

Sunday made that choice harder to defend. Dallas led by two scores, benched its starting quarterback for Gardner Minshew, and watched Arizona take the game anyway. Last season the offense was never the problem, since it scored 27.7 points per game, seventh best in the league, and still finished 7-9-1. A good offense and a losing record together point to something bigger than one position or one play call.

In July, Jones told reporters he liked that the media did not expect his team to contend for the Super Bowl. Right now, the media is not alone in that view.