Appearing Tuesday on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas, Cowboys owner and G.M. Jerry Jones made a clunky case for the absence of a correlation between coaching pay and wins.
When he makes his second weekly visit of the team’s flagship station, he should be asked this question: Would you want Andy Reid, Sean Payton, John Harbaugh, Sean McVay, or Kyle Shanahan to be the Cowboys’ head coach?
They’re the five highest-paid coaches in the league. And any team that doesn’t have an objectively great coach would absolutely want one of those five.
Because they win. In 2026, their combined record is 25-11-1. They have six Super Bowl trophies, and 11 Super Bowl appearances.
They’re highly compensated because they win. Which makes them worthy of high compensation.
It’s obvious. And it’s insulting to the intelligence of anyone with reasonable cognitive skills (which barely qualifies me to be insulted) for Jerry to insist that there’s “zero correlation” between coaching pay and wins.
So what’s really going on here? At one level, he’s being cheap when it comes to a budgetary line item that has no salary cap, or salary floor. At another level, he likely doesn’t want to have a true alpha whose W-2 would allow him to take over the team, and to minimize the outsized influence of anyone named Jones.
Whatever the case, Jones’s strategy to treat a coaching search like an exercise in wildcatting ignores the fact that he can afford to pay for a high-functioning oil well. But he doesn’t want to spend the money — and he doesn’t want to give the coach the power that comes from being highly paid.
Through it all, the Cowboys haven’t been to the NFC Championship since 1995. And there’s definitely a correlation between Jerry’s approach to hiring coaches and the continuation of “this ‘drought’ that people say we’re in.”