When Barry Switzer stepped into Jimmy Johnson’s shoes in 1994, he arrived at a fractured franchise. He’d be taking over a team that had just seen an ugly split with its two-time Super Bowl-winning coach. Yet, Switzer didn’t shy away from that responsibility.
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Thirty-two years later, as veteran broadcaster Dale Hansen looks back at his time in Dallas, he believes there’s one reason for his success, and it’s not Switzer.
“At the practice facility, you said to me, ‘Hey, Hansen, you’re gonna love this guy.’ I said, ‘No, I know I’m gonna love the guy because he was the craziest head coach I’d ever known in my life when he was at Oklahoma.’ Now, obviously, it went off the rails rather quickly, but it went off the rails because I still think that you’re right: the assistant coaches saved him,” said Hansen, while speaking on the Dallas Dialogue with Dale.
This wouldn’t be the first time Switzer and Hansen have tangled, as Dallas Nation may know. Back in August 1994, during training camp, Switzer confronted Hansen about reports that there was a power struggle between the assistant head coaches and Switzer. At the time, Switzer, in an animated discussion, spoke about fabricated stories.
However, behind the stories of power struggles, there was a reality Switzer knew he faced. Despite arriving in Dallas with three national championships with Oklahoma, the NFL was a whole different level. It wouldn’t be easy. We had seen this before with Jimmy Johnson. His first year with the Cowboys ended with a 1-15 record.
That’s why Switzer made the smart choice and retained Johnson’s staff. After all, this was the same staff that helped change the franchise’s fate and won two Super Bowls.
“It’s the greatest coaching staff in the NFL,” Switzer said at the time. “I competed against some of them. I just ask them to give me a chance. Just let me garner their respect.”
Dallas already had Ernie Zampese as offensive coordinator and Butch Davis as defensive coordinator. At the same time, the staff also included future NFL head coaches Dave Campo and Mike Zimmer, among others. And that proved incredibly useful.
Even though the 1994 regular season started with a win, the first few weeks made the franchise look unlike the Super Bowl winners fans had been used to watching. They cut it close against the Houston Oilers in week two, and a loss in the following week against the Detroit Lions put the team on notice. But that’s when the team started to stabilize, and Hansen believes it came down to the coaching staff.
“I’ll go to my grave arguing this. Yes, he won a Super Bowl. But a friend of mine once said, ‘My mom could have won that Super Bowl with those assistant coaches.'”
Now, even Jerry Jones had famously admitted how 500 coaches could have won the Super Bowl with that team. And with Barry Switzer, that Super Bowl win became a reality in 1995. However, to say that it was largely the assistant coaches who were responsible for the win wouldn’t be entirely correct.
The same staff that had won two Super Bowls were defeated by the San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Championship game in the 1994 season. And in the following year, Switzer was faced with a bigger problem.
His defensive coordinator, Butch Davis, had just left for the Miami Hurricanes, and he needed Dave Campo to take up the role. Even then, the Cowboys came home with yet another Super Bowl win.
And while that staff may have won him the Lombardi in the 1995 season, they couldn’t do so in the following two years. In fact, when Campo took over as head coach in 2000, the team failed to qualify for the playoffs.
Sure, Switzer inherited a strong team, but his coaching philosophy also had a role to play. Dallas defensive lineman Tony Casillas summarized it best when he described Switzer. “He’s a lot like Jimmy in that he knows how to win, but he knows how to have fun, too.”
Despite this, the belief among franchise veterans is that the team could have won a few more trophies had Jimmy Johnson stayed in charge. In fact, Troy Aikman, another participant on the same show Hansen participated in, had previously made it abundantly clear.
“The frustrating thing for me, and I think I can speak for my teammates, every year Jimmy would address that if we do things we are capable of doing as a team, there would be enough credit to go around for everybody. And so, our team did put the ego aside — myself, Emmitt (Smith), and Michael (Irvin), and the others. Unfortunately, the two that were the leaders of the group, they couldn’t do the same, and that’s the disappointing thing for me.”