Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones made headlines Tuesday morning when he became angry during one of his weekly radio interviews, getting defensive when asked about the franchise’s lack of offseason moves to improve the roster.

Jones seemed to take exception with the line of questioning because he was speaking on the team’s flagship radio station, 105.3 The Fan in Dallas. Jones conducts interviews with the station on Tuesday and Friday mornings. He also takes part in a pregame interview with the station.

While attending NFL meetings Tuesday afternoon in Atlanta, Jones explained in an exclusive interview with The Athletic’s Dianna Russini why he reacted the way he did.

“I don’t know that I would go as far as (calling) the volume connotation as yelling,” Jones said. “OK? But the facts are that if I’m going to be grilled by the tribunal, I don’t need it to be by the guys I’m paying. I can take it from fans and take it from other people. I take a lot of pride in how fair and how much I try to work with the media, we’re brothers and sisters. But I was a little frustrated there today.

“We got in there as of accounting for decisions made in the offseason. OK? They might as well gone back to decisions made in 2010. My point is, and that’s from my perspective, there’s no question, I’m sure that they would have liked to have grilled me like the fans are thinking, what are you going to do about that? I get it. I get all of that. And really will go along with it.”

Jones went on to explain how his frustration stemmed from the individuals asking the questions, not necessarily the topic itself.

“The wrong ones were doing the questioning. Now, if those had been real fans sitting there or if there had been people that knew what they were talking about, football people, I might have had a different answer.”

Jones also made it clear that he has no plans of making significant changes to his coaching staff. The majority of Dallas’ coaches are on either one-year deals or are in the final year of their contracts. Coach Mike McCarthy is in the final year of his five-year deal.

The Cowboys are coming off a 47-9 loss to the Detroit Lions on Sunday at AT&T Stadium, the worst home loss in Jones’ 35 years as owner and general manager.

“Of course,” Jones said when asked about sticking with McCarthy and his coordinators. “Not even a distant thought about that. But the game is repetition. We clearly know what we did wrong. You can see that. The same guys that did it wrong have done it right many times over these past few months. So I know they can go out there and get it right.

“The point is, what do you do? What you do is go out there and do your techniques or do your effort, and do all of those things and you do it righter, and you’ll be in games that don’t get out of hand and you can win.”

Jones said he still believes in the team, which enters its bye week at 3-3.

“Of course we do,” he said. “We have great personnel. I’m proud of our personnel.”

Will Dallas try to improve the roster by making any moves before the trade deadline?

“Not thinking that,” Jones said.

Required Reading

(Photo: Sam Hodde / Getty Images)

It’s the midpoint of the college football season and usually, the coaching carousel is spinning much faster. It’s spinning slower this year for a few reasons. First, the past two seasons had much more turnover than initially expected; second, this is the first year of the 12-team College Football Playoff, which is extending the potential waiting time on some search options.

Things could get active at the Group of 5 level soon, though. Here’s our midseason assessment after talking to numerous industry sources about the FBS coaching landscape.

AAC

Mike Houston, East Carolina: 3-3 record this season

Before getting the ECU job, Houston went 37-6 at James Madison and won an FCS national title. He led the Pirates to two bowl games in his first four seasons but went 2-10 last year. His team just got whupped by 31 at Charlotte, now a rival program, and has lost by far its best player, cornerback Shavon Revel, to a season-ending knee injury. ECU still has Army and Navy, both Top 25 teams, plus 5-1 North Texas left. Tulsa, FAU and Temple are all very winnable. Getting to six wins might buy him more time, but his team could use a few wins down the stretch. Temperature check: Warm.

Mike Bloomgren, Rice: 2-4

This is a tough job. The former Stanford assistant got the Owls into a bowl game in his fifth year. Last season was his best: a 6-7  record that included snapping a seven-game losing streak to Houston. The Owls got off to a 1-4 start but just notched a nice, close win against UTSA for their first win against an FBS opponent. Getting bowl eligible looks doubtful, especially with only UAB seemingly looking like a likely win — and that one is on the road. Temperature check: A little warm.

Stan Drayton, Temple: 1-5

It’s been tough for Drayton to get much traction so far. The Owls are 2-16 in AAC play. The program wasn’t in great shape when Drayton took over for Rod Carey, whose teams only won two of his last 15 AAC games before he was fired. The Owls could really use a win at home against struggling Tulsa this weekend to get a little momentum going. Temperature check: Getting warmer.

Trent Dilfer, UAB: 1-5

The former NFL quarterback-turned-TV analyst had a lot of success building a powerhouse high school program in Nashville before getting the Blazers job over then-offensive coordinator Bryant Vincent, who not so coincidentally has done terrific in his debut season as the head man at the University of Louisiana-Monroe. That dynamic isn’t helping the situation for the first-time college coach. Vincent’s team blew out UAB 32-6 in early September. Dilfer went 4-8 last year and the Blazers are really struggling this year. Aside from a win over FCS Alcorn in the opener, this has been rough. They hung around against Arkansas and gave the Hogs a game, but the rest of the slate has been blowouts. They have home games against Tulsa, UConn and Rice. They need to win at least one of two of those to show some progress to quiet some of the critics since this was a fairly high-profile, outside-the-box hire. Temperature check: Getting hot.

ACC

Mack Brown, North Carolina: 3-4

The Tar Heels has been pretty good in Brown’s second stint with the program. In his second season back, they finished No. 18. The Tar Heels have won 17 games the past two seasons but it feels like the program has fallen off quite a bit this year. They’ve lost four in a row, including giving up 70 to JMU at home. The bright side: three of their remaining five opponents have losing records. Getting to six wins isn’t out of the question but there’s been increasing chatter that it might be time for a change from the 73-year-old Brown. Temperature check: Getting a lot warmer.

Big 12

Dave Aranda, Baylor: 2-4

The wild roller coaster ride that has been Aranda’s tenure in Waco, Texas has struggled to ramp back up. He went 2-7 in his first season and then, after overhauling his offensive staff, led Baylor to a 12-2 season, finishing No. 5. Since then, the Bears are 11-20. Baylor almost made a coaching change last winter but showed more patience with Aranda. There were more staff moves made that included Aranda taking over the defense this season. But after some good early signs, that side of the ball is struggling again. The issue has been that Aranda hasn’t recruited well enough or close to the level that Matt Rhule did. Aside from this weekend’s game at Texas Tech, none of the next five opponents have winning records. Temperature check: Hot.

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Big Ten

Mike Locksley, Maryland: 3-3

A fast start has cooled quickly, with two double-digit losses including a dismal home showing where the Terrapins lost by 27 to a middling Northwestern team. Worse still, they’ll probably be underdogs in each of their last six games. A rebuilt O-line has struggled mightily, as has the secondary. Word out of College Park is that Locksley, who is so well-respected locally, has built up so much goodwill in his time there, especially having posted back-to-back eight-win seasons while in the much tougher side of the Big Ten and that’ll afford him a mulligan this year. In the previous 40 years, the Terps had only one stretch of three consecutive winning seasons until Locksley did it from 2021-2023. Temperature check: Lukewarm.

Ryan Walters, Purdue: 1-5

The former Colorado defensive back did outstanding work as Illinois’ defensive coordinator before getting this job. The Purdue offense sputtered in his debut season, managing 17 points or less six times in a 4-8 year. Walters fired OC Graham Harrell early this season and Purdue’s woes have continued. A 49-0 win over FCS Indiana State is the lone victory, but they did show signs of life, almost knocking off No. 23 Illinois on the road last weekend, 50-49, with freshman QB Ryan Browne in his first start. Four of their remaining six games are against top-16 teams.  The other two teams are .500 Northwestern and at Michigan. Can the Boilers notch at least one win to show some progress? Two years isn’t close to enough time, so I’d be very surprised if the Boilers made a move. After all, this is a program that hasn’t finished in the Top 25 once in the past 20 years and only had four winning seasons in the past 16 years. Temperature check: Getting a little warm.

Conference USA

Sonny Cumbie, Louisiana Tech: 2-4

He went 6-18 in his first two years. The Bulldogs lost their first three games against FBS teams this season. They hammered a bad MTSU team for their first FBS win of the season last week but weren’t able to build off of that. They lost in double-overtime to New Mexico State. Next up is another woeful team, UTEP. I thought 5-7 looked like where they were headed, but that was before losing to NMSU. Temperature check: Getting hotter.

I think Cumbie can buy himself another year with five wins. Photo: Jaylynn Nash / Imagn Images

MAC

Mike Neu, Ball State: 2-4

A former star QB for the Cardinals, Neu actually led Ball State to a Top 25 season in 2020, when the Cardinals finished No. 23. Neu followed that up with another bowl trip. They’ve tailed off some in the past two years and are off to a shaky start. They escaped with a two-point win against a hapless Kent State team on the road for their first FBS win. With the way their schedule sets up, getting more than three wins seems like a reach. He’s been the head coach for nine years and he’s the only one in school history that ever produced a Top 25 season, although Pete Lembo and Brady Hoke each did have double-digit win seasons. Still, this is a very tough place to win at. Temperature check: Warm.

Joe Moorhead, Akron: 1-6

One of the game’s better offensive minds has struggled to get any momentum here. He had back-to-back 2-10 seasons to start and looks like he might be headed to another one. Beyond Kent State, they won’t play another team with a losing record this season. Temperature check: Pretty warm.

Scot Loeffler, Bowling Green: 2-4

He’s coming off of his best season of his first five years, when the Falcons went 7-6. They are off to a slow start this fall but they’ve had three losses by a touchdown or less, including against two ranked teams on the road — Penn State and Texas A&M. I think they’re good enough to rally for six wins but even if they don’t, it’s hard to think they can expect better than what they’ve had from Loeffler. Temperature check: Sort of warm.

Kenni Burns, Kent State: 0-6

He took over for Sean Lewis, who left to become an OC at Colorado. Lewis led Kent State to its first bowl win and had two seven-win seasons at a place that’s only had three winning seasons since 1987. Burns, a former Minnesota running back coach, won one game in his first season, and is still looking for his first win this season. Losing to FCS St. Francis still stings. Can they knock off Akron in late November to get a win? I think it’s pretty poor form to hire someone and only give him two seasons, but if there is only one win or less in each of Burns’ first two years, it wouldn’t be surprising if the school got itchy. Temperature check: Getting warm.

Mountain West

Tim Skipper, Fresno State: 3-3

A former Bulldogs middle linebacker, Skipper is a well-respected part of the Fresno family and stepped up after Jeff Tedford stepped down for health reasons. Fresno State got off to a 3-1 start before losing the past two games. The Bulldogs have a decent shot to become a bowl team. If Fresno can go on a big run in the second half of the season, maybe Skipper can keep this job. Temperature check: Warm.

Nate Dreiling, Utah State: 1-5

The 33-year-old interim is still looking for his first FBS win. They pounded FCS Robert Morris in the opener and were then blasted in their next five games. Temperature check: They’ll be starting over this winter.

SEC

Sam Pittman, Arkansas: 4-2

After going 4-8 last season, Pittman’s seat was hot coming into this year, but he might be coaching his way to another. The Razorbacks won at Auburn and have a nice win against Tennessee their last time out. They still have 1-5 Mississippi State ahead and 2-3 Louisiana Tech. They may also be capable of knocking off LSU with the Tigers coming off the comeback win against Ole Miss last week. Barring a collapse, I think he’ll earn more time, unless the school is convinced it has a big upgrade waiting in the wings. Temperature check: Hot but cooling off a bit.

Billy Napier, Florida: 3-3

Florida doesn’t have a lot of patience with football coaches. The Gators fired Dan Mullen, who’d won 29 games in his first three seasons but got the axe after going 5-6. Jim McElwain won 19 games in his first two seasons and then went 3-4 and got fired. Will Muschamp got four years. Ron Zook didn’t even get three. Napier went 11-14 his first two years after an impressive run at Louisiana. This season has been a mixed bag. The Gators got pounded by Miami in the opener in The Swamp but the team is still battling for Napier. That’s been a big plus, in addition to the tricky timeline now with CFP candidates potentially in play.

There’s been a ton of dysfunction around the university, all the way up to the university president fleeing.

The good news: the Gators thumped Mississippi State in Starkville, Miss., beat UCF by double-digits and almost upset Tennessee in Knoxville before losing in overtime. They have four top-20 opponents left, including two in the top five, vs. Georgia and at Texas. The only team with a losing record remaining is their road trip to 1-5 FSU. They just lost starting QB Graham Mertz for the rest of the season. Can true freshman DJ Lagway spark a strong second half to get Florida to 6-6? If they win this weekend against Kentucky, don’t rule it out. Temperature check: Toasty.

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Sun Belt

Shawn Clark, Appalachian State: 2-4

The former App State offensive lineman is well thought of in the Mountaineer community and he has three seasons with at least nine wins in his first four years. This year has been messy. They’ve lost three in a row, all by double digits and by giving up a ton of points. Just getting to five wins (the game against Liberty was canceled last month) looks dicey. And Appalachian State is not used to losing. Temperature check: Getting warm.

Butch Jones, Arkansas State: 3-3

Under Jones, the Red Wolves have gone from two wins to three wins to six and bowl game last year. I think they should get bowl eligible again. Their next two games are against Southern Miss and Troy, both 1-5 teams. They also have two games against two-win teams, so 6-6 feels like the floor, with seven wins seemingly realistic.
Temperature check: A little warm.

Will Hall, Southern Miss: 1-5

The son of a Mississippi high school legend, Hall, a very successful Division II coach, seemed like an excellent choice when he got this job four years ago. After a solid season season where the Golden Eagles went 7-6 and won a bowl game, they have backslid quite a bit. They went 3-9 last year and are really struggling now. All five losses have been by double-digits. They still have to go to JMU and Texas State. The final two games of the season are against two-win South Alabama and one-win Troy on the road. Temperature check: Very hot.

(Top illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Adam Davis, James Gilbert, Grant Halverson / Getty)

At least Thomas Tuchel is likely to be spared the kind of reception that awaited Sven-Goran Eriksson when the Swede became the first foreign coach to manage the England national team.

“FA, hang your heads in shame. No surrender,” read the banner held by a man standing outside FA headquarters in London in November 2000. The protestor was dressed as “John Bull”, a pulp magazine personification of Englishness, wearing a top hat, a red jacket, a Union Jack waistcoat and a look of profound distaste.

It went beyond that one-man protest. Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, called Eriksson’s appointment “a betrayal of our coaching structure”. John Barnwell, his counterpart at the League Managers Association, said it “beggars belief — another example of us giving away our family treasures in Europe”.

The most famous — or infamous — line surrounding Eriksson’s arrival came from the Daily Mail’s veteran columnist Jeff Powell, who wrote that the FA was “selling our birthright down the fjord to a nation of 7million skiers and hammer-throwers who spend half their lives living in total darkness”.

In the documentary released shortly before he died in August, Eriksson looked back and laughed. “England: you can’t say no,” he said with a chuckle. “I would have regretted (not taking it) all my life, I suppose.”

Despite the anguish brought by three successive quarter-final defeats (and despite his dismay over tabloid scrutiny of his private life), Eriksson never regretted answering the FA’s call. Fabio Capello, who seven years later became England’s second overseas coach, has been known to give the opposite impression.

The strange thing about Tuchel’s impending appointment is that it feels so… 2000s, frankly. Wasn’t the FA meant to have consigned its overseas coach era to history by now?

Yes, it was. That was made clear when St George’s Park was opened amid considerable fanfare 12 years ago. David Sheepshanks, the chairman of the project, told reporters that the FA would not have to look abroad for England coaches of the future if, as he expected, “we have homegrown Premier League and international managers emanating from the education advantages” the new national football centre would offer. Rather than throw millions of pounds at short-term solutions, this was a long-term investment.

This surge of homegrown coaching talent has not happened — at least not to anything like the degree hoped for and anticipated.

Some bleak statistics: no English manager has won a European trophy since Bobby Robson with Barcelona in 1997; no English manager has won the league title since Howard Wilkinson with Leeds United in 1992; no English manager has even won the FA Cup since Harry Redknapp with Portsmouth in 2008 or the League Cup since Steve McClaren with Middlesbrough in 2004; since 2003, English managers have taken charge of a combined total of just 44 matches in the Champions League (Frank Lampard 16, Redknapp 10, Graham Potter seven, Eddie Howe six, Craig Shakespeare three, Michael Carrick one, Gary Neville one).

International football is different, though. It is why someone as successful as Capello (a “winner with a capital W”, as then-FA chief executive Brian Barwick lauded him on his appointment) found himself so flummoxed by the peculiar demands of managing England at a World Cup. It is why someone with a CV as underwhelming as Gareth Southgate’s (45 wins from 151 games in charge of Middlesbrough) could be responsible for their two best tournament campaigns since that solitary World Cup triumph in 1966.

Nor is this phenomenon unique to the England team. Look at the contrast between Spain’s underwhelming performance at the 2022 World Cup, under a Champions League-winning coach in Luis Enrique, and their vibrant displays in winning Euro 2024 under a coach, Luis de la Fuente, who, like Southgate, has acquired experience through the national team’s junior setup.

Look at Argentina’s success under Lionel Scaloni, whose only previous experience as a head coach was with their under-20 team.

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But the longer Southgate stayed in the job, the closer he came without quite delivering the success the country craves, the more you could hear the clamour for the FA to appoint another “winner with a capital W”.

Southgate was always cast in some quarters as the reason England kept falling just short — which, after decades of falling a long way short, seemed strange. Whatever the undoubted qualities he brought to the job, it was always assumed by his critics that any half-decent coach who operates in the top half of the Premier League or the later stages of the Champions League would bring all of those plus, crucially, the hard-nosed winning mentality and hard-wired tactical expertise of a Pep Guardiola, a Carlo Ancelotti or a Jurgen Klopp.

Or… a Thomas Tuchel? Possibly, but this appointment still represents an unexpected pivot from an FA that has spent the past decade banging the drum — with growing confidence, it had seemed — for English coaches.

The unheralded Scaloni won the World Cup with Argentina (Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty Images)

They never closed the door entirely on the idea of looking overseas for an England manager — indeed, they have reaped huge dividends from going Dutch with the appointment of Sarina Wiegman, who in 2022 led England to their first Women’s European Championship title. The fact that Tuchel has worked in English football previously — and shown an affinity with English players, both at Chelsea and at Bayern — is an advantage that Eriksson and Capello did not have.

But it has consistently been made clear by the FA, even as different executives and decision-makers have come and gone, that a homegrown candidate would be its preference.

There was some support for the idea of a permanent elevation for England Under-21 coach Lee Carsley, who took charge of the senior team on an interim basis after Southgate resigned in July. There has certainly been enthusiasm, going back several years, for the notion of appointing Howe or Potter.

But when it came to the crunch, after tentative enquiries about Guardiola (focused on Manchester City) and Klopp (preparing for a new role as Red Bull’s head of global soccer) came to nothing, they moved decisively for Tuchel, swayed by his trophy successes as coach of Borussia Dortmund (one DFB-Pokal/German Cup), Paris Saint-Germain (two Ligue 1 titles, a Coupe de France/French Cup, a Coupe de la Ligue/French League Cup and two Trophees des Champions/French Super Cups), Chelsea (one Champions League, one European Super Cup, one Club World Cup) and Bayern Munich (one Bundesliga title).

It is a level of trophy success that no English coach comes within a million miles of. Howe can boast a Championship (English second-tier) title with Bournemouth, Potter a Svenska Cupen/Swedish Cup success with Ostersunds and Carsley a European Under-21 Championship title with England — all of them, Howe’s in particular, impressive in their own right — but none has come close to landing any of the game’s biggest prizes.

If you are going to go down the “winner with a capital W” road, seeking what Carsley described over the weekend as a “world-class coach who has won trophies”, then the homegrown route isn’t really an option for England.

But we are back to the question of De la Fuente and Scaloni — and, yes, Southgate, Joachim Low, Roger Lemerre and so many others through the course of history — and whether international management requires not just a different skill set on the training pitch and the touchline but a different mindset in the weeks and months between international breaks.

If something has changed in the FA’s thinking, leading them to restore trophy-winning experience to the top of the job spec, it is perhaps because of how England’s Euro 2024 unfolded.

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The more talented creative players Southgate had at his disposal, the harder he found it to strike the right tactical balance. As Carsley discovered against Greece last week, picking Jude Bellingham, Bukayo Saka, Cole Palmer, Antony Gordon and Phil Foden in the same line-up might not be the brainwave it had appeared after a 20-minute experiment on the training pitch.

England have a glut of attacking talent — it is hard to fit them all in a team (Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images)

Maybe the job requires a firmer hand now. Maybe the surplus of creative players requires the type of toughness and ruthlessness that the modern English coach — a more touchy-feely type, whether it is Southgate, Howe, Potter, Carsley, Gary O’Neil, Rob Edwards, Russell Martin or anyone else except perhaps Sean Dyche — is yet to develop fully.

If Southgate’s approach was considered perfect for the largely unheralded group of players he took to the 2018 World Cup, maybe the changing profile of the squad brings a demand for a different profile of coach, accustomed to working with top-level talents (and perhaps top-level egos) and turning them into a cohesive, balanced team.

One concern is that Tuchel’s Bayern team didn’t look much like that last season when they were beaten to the Bundesliga title for the first time in 12 campaigns. Neither did his Chelsea or PSG teams towards the end. At those three clubs, and indeed Dortmund and Mainz before that, he left in strained circumstances. There were tensions with the boardroom or dressing room or both. It was the biggest thing that deterred Manchester United from appointing him in place of Erik ten Hag last summer.

In other words, Tuchel is very different to the long-held FA ideal of a coach who keeps his head down and says the right thing. And it would be easier to get behind the idea of England being managed by a disruptor — The Rulebreaker, to borrow the delightful title of a biography by German journalists Tobias Schachter and Daniel Meuren — if they had not just enjoyed their best run of tournament campaigns in more than half a century under an unashamed conformist.

Beyond that, surely the England manager should be English. Not must, as some would have it, but should. England have enjoyed notable success under overseas coaches in other sports — and in women’s football — but it does not feel remotely controversial to suggest that the whole point of international sport should be to pit one nation’s talent against others.

There is already a backlash from some quarters against the prospect of a German taking charge of the England team, just as there was anger from the same quarters last month when Carsley did not sing along to the national anthem. At times, when it comes to the national team, the discourse goes far beyond reasonable principles of what international sport should be about and into the type of bombastic, jingoistic rhetoric that held English football back for so many years.

It is largely thanks to overseas influence that English football seems more enlightened these days. Even by the time of Capello’s appointment in 2007, the idea of the FA looking abroad for an England manager seemed far less alarming than it had seven years earlier.

But now, it feels like a regressive step in the message it sends to English coaches.

Carsley took on the interim role but his stint fell flat (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

Carsley’s audition was far from perfect, undermined by his team selection against Greece and the confused messages in some of his media interviews, but he is barely less qualified for the England senior job than Southgate was in 2016. Potter would surely have been in with a shout had this job come up when he was at Brighton & Hove Albion in the summer of 2022, yet he seems to have been overlooked entirely based on a six-month tenure at Chelsea when they were at the height of their post-takeover dysfunction (something with which Tuchel would sympathise). Howe has a desirable job at Newcastle United, but if the eligibility criteria for the England job include winning the game’s biggest prizes, could an English manager ever do that without putting himself far beyond the FA’s reach?

If it comes down to who has the best CV, it is hard to imagine how the best-qualified English coach could trump whichever leading manager happens to be looking for work after falling off the Champions League carousel, having parted ways with PSG, Chelsea, Bayern or whoever — or in Tuchel’s case, all three.

Even so, recent tournaments have strengthened the feeling that the international game is different: that hiring a “winner with a capital W” is not the shortcut to success that the FA previously imagined it was.

Should Tuchel succeed where his predecessor fell agonisingly short, then no England supporter, no matter how ingrained their John Bull tendencies, will find their celebratory fervour dampened by the nationality of the coach.

But Tuchel’s first challenge will be to measure up to the standard Southgate set over the previous eight years — and because this is international football, with its different rhythm and challenges, that is not the foregone conclusion it might otherwise seem.

(Top photo: Sven Hoppe/picture alliance via Getty Images; design: Meech Robinson)