OK, so that’s not what he really said. Borrowing one of the two most overused terms in football (the other is “awesome”), Cowboys offensive coordinator Bill Callahan says he’s “excited” to be calling the plays in Dallas this year.
“Excited would be the word, would be the adjective, that I would use,” Callahan told the team’s official website. “I’m really excited. Anxious now.”
But while on a day-to-day level Callahan’s new gig entails calling plays for the first time in the NFL since he was fired by the Raiders after the 2003 season, the bigger picture is that, if Callahan fails, head coach Jason Garrett likely will end up paying for it with his job.
The much-discussed change, which by all appearances was forced on coach Jason Garrett by owner Jerry Jones in a way that was supposed to look like it was Garrett’s decision, undoubtedly arises from Garrett’s periodic inability to juggle the task of calling offensive plays while also managing the clock. And it sounds, mechanically, as if Garrett won’t be part of the play-in, play-out process -- unless he decides to interject.
“We’ve had a lot of play-it-out scenarios, we’ve had two-minute, we’ve had four-minute, we’ve had red zone play-it-out, we have team blitz play-it-out,” Callahan said. “So we’ve been in every possible scenario you could be in situationally, and we’ve called the game live on the field. That communication process has really gotten more comfortable for me, [quarterbacks coach] Wade [Wilson] and the quarterback.”
But Callahan added the perfunctory mention that it all will be a “collective” effort, which means that Garrett will get part of the credit if it all goes well.
As he should. Given that he’ll get fired if it doesn’t, Garrett should at least get to share the spotlight if his “decision” to let someone else stand in it works.