Whether Switzer likes it or not, when the two-time defending Super Bowl champion Cowboys open their National Football League season in Pittsburgh this Sunday, the whole football world will be watching – and rushing to pass judgment. Switzer has inherited the game’s best team, but he may have also assumed its toughest job. No team has ever won three straight Super Bowls. And Switzer will attempt to do it while replacing Jimmy Johnson, who earned his players’ loyalty during a five-year ten-ure that saw Dallas resurrect its stature as “America’s Team.” “It’s a classic no-win situation,” says NBC football commentator Will McDonough. “Win and you may not even get the credit, but lose and you sure take the blame.”
The only person not singing Johnson’s praises after January’s Super Bowl triumph was owner and general manager Jerry Jones. What he saw in Johnson, his former University of Arkansas football teammate, was an escalating lack of respect for the risks Jones had taken – principally financial – and the contributions he had made as GM to assemble the team. “You can be pretty arrogant when you’re spending someone else’s money,” says Jones. (Johnson declined to be interviewed.) “It appeared to me that Jimmy got confused about whose fanny was ultimately on the line.” The Cowboys, perhaps even the entire city of Dallas, were no longer big enough to contain both egos, so Jones and Johnson forged their final “mutual decision” – to part company.
Jones immediately beckoned Switzer, another old college acquaintance. Despite an extraordinary .837 winning percentage and three national championships in 16 seasons at the University of Oklahoma, Switzer had been out of football, pursuing business interests, for five years. In 1989 a spate of felonies committed by his players, including a gang rape and a shooting, had cost Switzer his job and tarnished his reputation. “I didn’t rape anyone or sell any drugs,” says Switzer, who believes he was unfairly blamed. “I take responsibility for raising my own children, and they’re the three greatest kids in the world.”
At Oklahoma, Switzer was renowned as a motivator who left his players alone off the field but drove them hard at practice. Now Switzer has shucked the college rah-rah and eased into a more classic pro mold, as much administrator as mentor. He avoids scolding players on the field, preferring quieter one-to-one chats later – on the sidelines – about their mistakes. “The biggest job in pro football is to get them to play for you,” says McDonough, “and Barry really knows how to schmooze them.” Just a week after camp opened, star receiver Michael Irvin, who had thrown a public tantrum after Johnson’s departure, could be seen walking with his arm around Switzer. Jones says Switzer’s loyalty – Jones’s detractors use a less flattering word – will enable him to re-establish the executive-coach relationship that had proven so successful. “I don’t want a puppet,” he says. “I made the change to get back to what had worked in the past, not to get away from it.”
The change that is really no change at all has emerged as the Cowboys’ training-camp theme. “The only difference I see is we’re going to be 1994 world champions, not 1993,” says guard Nate Newton. Switzer kept Johnson’s staff; practice drills are run the same to the mil-lisecond. “Jimmy’s and my philosophy are the same,” Switzer says. “We played for the same guy [Frank Broyles at Arkansas], we coached for the same guy [Chuck Fairbanks at Oklahoma]. There are a lot of similarities.”
Still, there are inevitable differences. “You can’t replace the head coach and say everything is the same,” says Troy Aikman, the Cowboys’ brilliant quarterback who played briefly for Switzer at Oklahoma. “Barry is going to have to earn our respect.” Switzer asks only for time. Acceptance and respect will come, he says, with a few victories: “Winning usually takes care of everything.”
What should take care of winning is the team itself. It boasts nine returning ‘94 Pro Bowlers, headed by Aikman, who last season completed an extraordinary 69.1 percent of his passes; Emmitt Smith, who won his third straight rushing title as well as the league and Super Bowl MVPs, and Irvin, who has caught 259 passes over three seasons. “When I play the game I don’t really give a damn about the head coach,” says Pro Bowler Newton. “I look to Troy and Emmitt and Michael to make the plays. It’s up to us 11 guys on the field to get out and whip some ass.” The team does have a few holes, primarily on defense, where free agency coupled with the new salary cap cost the Cowboys some key players. But Dallas is blessed with tremendous depth and a rookie class already being compared with the ‘91 draft, which produced six current starters.
That leaves only the head coach unproven in the NFL ranks. Johnson succeeded with a demanding approach that prodded the Cowboys to respond to a succession of challenges and crises. “Within each season, Jimmy may have created more crises than needed, but they worked for us,” says Aikman. “At some point this season there will be a legitimate crisis, and how the players respond could be the key to the whole season.” Switzer says he’ll be ready to step up. But for the time being, he has stayed in the background and let the team’s veterans provide most of the leadership. “What we’ve got to do this year is too important to waste time worrying about who is coach,” says Newton.
Dallas is not the first team to get a crack at three straight Super Bowls. Five others – Green Bay 1967-68, Miami 1973-74, Pittsburgh 1975-76, Pittsburgh 1979-80 and San Francisco 1989-90 – have won back-to-back, but none reached the Super Bowl the next year. Age, injuries or the vagaries of the game caused them all to fall short. Sometimes the coach has exhausted his repertoire of tricks, or the team has simply wearied of his act. A coach-ing change could prove an effective motivational stratagem. “I don’t like it when things are getting too smooth,” says Jones. “I prefer that nervous feeling.”
Jones should get to enjoy plenty of that before the season ends. Dallas is every team’s target and, in this first year of the salary cap, the league is closer to parity than ever. But Switzer knows his X’s and O’s, and Dallas has the best talent to fill those blackboard letters. By the time Super Bowl XXIX rolls around in January, it’s likely to be Dallas’s opposition that once again is getting that nervous feeling.
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