The Cowboys made a change to the structure of their offensive staff for the second straight offseason when they hired former Lions offensive coordinator Scott Linehan to call plays on offense a year after moving Bill Callahan into that role.
While the Cowboys obviously didn’t think much of Callahan’s performance, they weren’t willing to let him move to another team as an offensive coordinator. Executive vice president Stephen Jones explained why the team blocked Callahan from moving on and why he’s not concerned about any disappointment that Callahan may have felt about the shift in his responsibilities.
“Everybody thinks the world of Bill,” Jones said, via the Dallas Morning News. “It’s an unfortunate situation that he gets caught up in the, well, he got something taken away from him or whatever it’s going to be portrayed as. But Bill Callahan is an unbelievable football coach. We just weren’t going to give him up and Jerry and I have a great relationship and the coaches have a great relationship with him. Everybody wants to go sometimes try to do what they were doing or whatever. But when we signed him contracts are two-way streets. They are not just for us to deal with if it doesn’t work out. And Bill is a professional;. Are you kidding me? He is working his butt off. Was he disappointed? Everybody has disappointments. I have had it. I’m sure you have had disappointments. Everybody has them.”
Jones likely objects to the portrayal of these moves as just rearranging the furniture in the same broken house, but those disappointments of the last few years will make it hard to argue otherwise until there’s an improvement in the results for Dallas next season.