Dallas lost 24-16 to a Tampa Bay team that had not won a game all season. The Buccaneers ran for 241 yards. The Cowboys ran for 50. Four days later, Dallas pulled a 60-year-old coach out of retirement.
Mike Pettine was announced Monday as a senior defensive assistant, a full-time role supporting first-year defensive coordinator Christian Parker. The team has not decided whether he will work from the sideline or the booth.
The Defense Is Historically Bad
Five games in, Dallas ranks last in the NFL in rushing yards allowed per game at 168.4 and last in opponent passer rating at 120.5. The Cowboys are the only team in the league without an interception. They have five sacks. They are allowing 27.0 points and 395 yards per game, second-worst in football.
Every quarterback they have faced has posted a passer rating above 100. All five of them.
Against Tampa Bay they lost the turnover battle 3-0 and generated seven pressures on a 22.6 percent rate. Brian Schottenheimer’s postgame assessment was about as basic as coaching gets: “we got to get him on the ground. We got to tackle him, got to wrap him up, and we didn’t do that.”
Who Pettine Is
Pettine turned 60 in September and had retired. Minnesota announced his departure in January after four seasons there, the last two as assistant head coach and outside linebackers coach.
His resume is long. He broke into the NFL with Baltimore in 2002 and spent seven seasons there, the last four coaching outside linebackers. He became the Jets defensive coordinator in 2009, and that first New York defense led the NFL in yards allowed. He ran Buffalo’s defense for a season, was Cleveland’s head coach in 2014 and 2015 with a 10-22 record, coordinated Green Bay’s defense from 2018 to 2020, then spent 2021 as a senior defensive assistant in Chicago.
The connective tissue matters here. Pettine hired Christian Parker as a defensive quality control coach in Green Bay in 2019, Parker’s first NFL job. Schottenheimer was the Jets offensive coordinator during Pettine’s first three seasons in New York. Per ESPN’s Todd Archer, Parker tried to talk Pettine out of retirement back in January when Dallas hired him.
Schottenheimer framed the hire plainly: “The most important thing for us was making sure we got the right guy. I feel very, very confident that we did.” He said Pettine will be “in a role to support everything that CP is leading and guiding.”
This Is an Admission
Bringing in a former head coach and three-time coordinator to “support” your first-year coordinator five games into the season is not a neutral personnel move. It is the organization saying out loud that it does not believe the current setup is working.
That is the right read. Dallas traded Micah Parsons to Green Bay for Kenny Clark and two first-round picks, acquired Quinnen Williams from the Jets, and traded a second-rounder for cornerback Joey Porter Jr. The Cowboys have spent real capital on this defense and it is the worst in the league against the run.
Jerry Jones, after the Tampa Bay loss, said the defense was right where it started. He was being generous.
What Pettine Can Actually Do
Not much about the personnel. Dallas is 2-3 heading into a mini-bye before a trip to Green Bay, and the roster is the roster until the November 10 deadline.
What a coach with Pettine’s background can do is simplify. Defenses that cannot tackle and cannot generate takeaways are usually defenses thinking too much. Pettine’s best units in New York and Green Bay were built on pressure concepts that gave players clear assignments.
If the Cowboys intercept a pass before November, this will have been worth it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.