Saturday, January 10, 1998

Barry Switzer got the best of Cowboys deal

By Bill Lyon / Knight Ridder Newspapers

PHILADELPHIA -- The easiest thing to do is simply dismiss him as little more than boob and buffoon.

Barry Switzer, the clueless coach.

But that's not entirely fair, or accurate. He did, after all, win the Super Bowl. The rebuttal, of course, is that the Dallas Cowboys won in spite of their coach, not because of him.

After all, the reason that Jerry Jones brought Switzer back from a five-year coaching exile in 1994 was to prove that what the owner had snapped at Jimmy Johnson when they had their ego-clashing breakup really was true: "There are 500 coaches out there who could win a Super Bowl with this team."

Switzer never had a chance when that got out. In one cruelly impetuous and thoughtless remark, the churlish Jones had branded his coach, had established a prefabricated image in everyone's mind, before Switzer even got to coach his first game.

Switzer didn't do anything to try to change that image, either. He's not a self-promoter. He never wanted all the credit for himself. He didn't live the job, didn't sleep in his office, didn't pretend that it was more complicated than advanced calculus.

"Don't make coaching more than what it is," he said. "It's players going out and playing good, and whichever team's players can do that while making the fewest mistakes, wins. It doesn't take 16 hours a day to figure that out."

So he made it easy for his critics. He was called a shameless slacker who had no idea what was in the game plan, and when he did take it upon himself to make a decision, it was always a stupendously stupid one.

The one that will haunt him always was here, in the Vet, the Cowboys and Eagles tied at 17, the Cowboys a foot shy of a first down at their own 29. Switzer ran Emmitt Smith off tackle. Smith was stuffed. But the play was nullified because the two-minute warning had been reached before the snap.

Given this stay of execution, did Switzer reconsider and punt? No, he ran Smith again. The "very same play" again! It was stuffed. The Eagles took over and kicked the winning field goal.

What got forgotten after that was that the Cowboys came out of that game and started to win and kept on winning, all the way through the Super Bowl. All anyone remembered was Switzer's monumental blunder. And yet, as unwise as it was as a tactical move, it was subtly brilliant as a psychological move.

"I was telling my team I had faith in them," he said later.

The Cowboys understood, even if no one else did.

Michael Irvin, who had threatened to quit football rather than play for Switzer after Johnson, his college coach, had been fired, stood up loudly for Switzer, saying: "We were in a major slump. By making that call, he was telling us, ÔI still believe y'all are the best in the world.' "

It's more convenient, though, to follow the pack and snicker about what an idiot he must surely be.

Yet for a long period, he was as successful a coach as there ever has been in college football. He made Oklahoma a dynasty, racking up national championships, and then investigations and probations. He took outlaws and renegades, and it was inevitable that it would all eventually self-destruct and turn into a funeral pyre of guns, drugs, rapes and 'roid rages.

The bootlegger's boy who grew up in tragedy and abject poverty surely asked for what he eventually got, but to claim that he knew nothing about football is to patently ignore the record.

Jones brought him to Dallas more as a caretaker than coach. His only orders were: "Just don't screw it up."

That's not always as easy as it sounds. And as a coach who had been enormously successful before leaving in disgrace, Switzer must have burned to prove himself again, to gain a certain measure of redemption. It must have required considerable restraint not to put his own imprimatur on the Cowboys. But, wisely, he didn't try.

As Irvin said: "Sometimes doing nothing is the right thing to do."

But not necessarily the easiest.

Switzer lasted even though his own quarterback let it be known he needed a buffer between himself and the head coach. So the Cowboys hired a quarterback coach, though everyone refers to him as the buffer coach. The Switzer-Troy Aikman "arrangement" made the Jon Gruden-Ricky Watters relationship look like a honeymoon.

A lot of coaches never would have put up with such a situation. Switzer did, and somehow he also put up with the most intruding owner in sports this side of the Yankees. He took the money and the humiliation, and maybe that made him a whore, but many of the same people who reviled him are sellouts and ethical prostitutes themselves.

It was said on Friday that Jones had accepted Switzer's resignation. It was a typical Jones event, which is to say that it featured him. Switzer was not there to defend himself.

Maybe Jones made it a condition of the payoff: Don't talk and the checks will keep coming. And maybe Switzer simply had no interest in petty vengeance. Maybe he doesn't need it.

Jones said only that the new coach won't be him. We all know what that means. Whoever the new coach is, he will be a hand puppet in the best Jerry Jones tradition. The owner cannot abide the notion that people might think the coach knows more than the owner does about football.

Switzer has been a scoundrel and a rogue in his lifetime. He has done some shameful things. The job of defending him is worthy of the valedictorian of a law school class.

But as you watched the imperious Jerry Jones on Friday, you could only think: Barry Switzer got the best of this deal.

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(Bill Lyon is a sports columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Write to him at: The Philadelphia Inquirer, 400 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pa. 19130.)