Saturday, January 10, 1998

Barry Switzer in a no-win situation all along

By Frank Luksa / The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS -- Barry Switzer's brief era as head coach of the Cowboys should be remembered foremost for the preposterous decision to hire him.

Switzer stepped out of shower in Norman, Okla., four years ago to answer a phone call from the team's beloved owner, Jerry Jones. Upon hearing that Jones wished him to coach the Cowboys, Switzer dropped his towel. Everyone else dropped his jaw.

Naked when hired, Switzer resigned his position Friday, stripped of a dignified exit and whipped by forces beyond his control. An in-absentia resignation at Valley Ranch bore the transparency of a firing after his fourth NFL season ended in 6-10 famine. For the third time since Jones brought the franchise in 1989, his dismissal of a head coach etched a clumsy pattern.

Switzer's term expired with the regular season finale in December. It was a given that he was gone. Yet Jones allowed the charade of Barry as skeleton coach to continue for almost three weeks and to humiliating length. Switzer was kept out of sight earlier this week during unveiling of the Larry Allen contract deal -- a cruel public rebuke.

Nor was it the first time that Jones, who professed deep kinship for his former college coach at Arkansas, made Switzer an object of mocked servitude to the owner. Switzer accepted a job he never sought under the major parameter Jones demands from a coach -- house-pet subservience to the master.

Jones represented one force Switzer couldn't overcome. The same fate awaits a future coach who assumes an alliance with Jones. He'll always play second fiddle to the megalomania of the owner's brass band.

Unknowing or uncaring, Jones helped reduce Switzer to a coaching caricature. Sideline scenes where Jones got in Switzer's ear as if imparting strategy caused a wince and national chuckle when caught by TV. Jones often assumed the role of coach in updating injuries and starting positions. He gagged the staff before last spring's draft, claiming fear of leaks, criticized defensive coaches at mid-season, sat in on their film study, at least once entered the coaches' press box roost during a game, and admitted dreams of coaching himself.

Jones already has spoken of how offensive and defensive systems will be redesigned, again trespassing into turf properly left to a coach. Every day and in every disturbing way, the Cowboys' operation comes closer to resembling the omnipresent rule of puppeteer Al Davis in Oakland.

Switzer's persona thus remained as a see-through figure without authority, phantom leader waving a cardboard sword. He lacked credibility from the outset as a college coach without NFL experience and retired five years after his Oklahoma career collapsed in a series of player scandals. Switzer also met a tide of parochial bias as a person from the wrong side of the Red River.

When Jones offered his famous analysis that 500 coaches could have won a Super Bowl with Jimmy Johnson's last team, he was probably right. The Cowboys were that good then. But beneath Switzer's initial success lay his most distinguished flaw -- coaching style.

Switzer's way was to assemble the best players, let them play under a lax rein and allow coaches to work without interference. He was an easy man to play for and coach under. However, he didn't inspire enough fear of failure in players. Indeed, Switzer was repelled by ranting coaches who used abusive methods to motivate.

His way worked for two years when the Cowboys had the best talent, won one Super Bowl and were stopped one step short of competing in another. Obviously not the best hire on any basis, neither was he the worst for those first two seasons. In fact, Switzer's coaxing manner at first drew approval in contrast to harping pressure applied by Johnson.

But easy ways don't work during hard times. Lack of firm discipline acceptable to a winner became unendurable for the loser plagued by thin drafts and free agent flops, injuries and age. Switzer's last team played like it practiced. By now he'd been judged responsible by assumption when drug and sex scandals plunged the Cowboys' image to an all-time low in a repeat of incidents at OU. A careless act of carrying a concealed handgun to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport last summer intensified his addled image and soiled Jones' get-clean campaign.

Jones had no choice but to fire Switzer, a likable man of coarse wit in person. The team quit on him. It had lost confidence and respect for his position. Once faith becomes misplaced, teams will not return to a coach.

Switzer has come and gone and so recedes into franchise history as a multiple victim -- his status undermined by Jones, unsupported by those in charge of finding fresh talent, beset by big-play stars who made few big plays and betrayed by his own coaching style.

Switzer will live on happily and without regret because, at 60, he said he doesn't have enough time left to have a bad time. He's also soothed by a philosophy he once expressed and which serves as an apt epitaph for his experience with the Cowboys: "Success is never final, and failure is never fatal."

---

(Frank Luksa is a sports columnist for the Dallas Morning News. Write to him at: Dallas Morning News, Communications Center, Dallas, Texas 75265.)