Troy Aikman was there for the great years, and he was there for the struggles that followed.
And what he sees from the Cowboys at the moment is closer to the latter than the former.
The former Cowboys quarterback and current FOX analyst said during an interview on 1310 The Ticket that the team needs a “complete overhaul.”
Considering the owner is also the General Manager, that seems unlikely, and Jerry Jones has said that he doesn’t intend to make a coaching change during the season.
“Go through the list and this team, over a long period of time, has been what it’s been,” Aikman said, via Todd Archer of ESPN.com. “It hasn’t always mattered who the head coach has been. So to me, if you’re asking me, I’d say there has to be a complete overhaul of the entire organization.”
Aikman clearly doesn’t expect Jones to let anyone else run the place, as he leans on his son Stephen Jones, along with vice president of player personnel Will McClay and coach Jason Garrett for personnel matters.
“I’ve heard Jerry say, ‘OK, look, we’re going to do it differently. I’m going to do it differently,’ . . . but it’s the same. Nothing changes,” Aikman said. “And that to me is the bigger issue beyond, yes, coaching is important, personnel, all those things are important, but how are you going about evaluating how you’re going about running the organization? Whatever that looks like — and everyone has an opinion on what it does look like, but I’m not in the building. I have no idea. I talk to people. I talk to people who have been inside the building and have a pretty good understanding how things are run and in a lot of ways there’s a lot of dysfunction and that has to change if this team is going to be able to compete on a consistent basis like the teams that you look to around the league that seemingly are in the hunt each and every year.”
Aikman may have a personal relationship with Garrett (they were teammates during the ’90s), but he also has a unique opportunity to see behind the curtain at other franchises, the good ones and the bad ones.
One former Cowboys coach likes to say, “You are what your record says you are.” The Cowboys are 3-5 at the moment, 70-58 in nine years under Garrett, and have exactly two playoff wins since Aikman beat the Vikings in the 1996 wild card round.