Peter King spent a lot of time talking to Jerry Jones about hiring Wade Phillips Friday night. Jerry was pretty candid about a lot of things. You should read the whole article because it has lots of interesting stuff in it, and I'm only going to excerpt a few paragraphs, although I felt like re-printing the whole thing.
It came down to Norv Turner and Wade Phillips as we already knew. King lays out the two options and what they would bring to the Cowboys. The Norv option allowed Jason Garrett to learn under Norv. He also adds in that Parcells told Jerry Jones that Todd Bowles has the attributes of a head coach.
He then describes the Wade Phillips option.
Jones liked what Parcells had done in his four years with the team, but he thought the defensive production could be better, and he liked what Phillips said in his interview about molding a defense according to the skills of the players you had. Jones had visions of DeMarcus Ware morphing into a world-class pass-rusher instead of a good one.
But the big thing that Jones said was that the decision came down to what Jones could live without.
"If we hire Norv, I decided we would have had double-coverage on offense because, in the end, I felt comfortable with our offense. And you may not know what you have [with Garrett] until you remove the net. It's like you have a good player on the field with a very good prospect behind him, and you'll never know about the prospect until you put him in the game and take the veteran out. The one player's a good player, and the other player might be a better player. You never will know until you put him out on the field. That's sort of how I felt with Jason.''
King also drops this enticing nugget on us.
King thinks it was a good hire.
Mickey Spags has an interesting story in his latest article. Jim Hess, a former coach in Texas and a scout for the Cowboys, is an old friend of Wade Phillips - and Bum - and gives his take on the hiring. The key part for me was this snippet, where Hess talks about Wade's common sense approach to coaching football.
But later on, Hess says he remembers Kenny Kennard playing nose tackle. He was smaller. He was a totally different player. So the Phillips guys adjusted, slanting him more to utilize his speed.
Just good, ol' common sense, and Hess insists Wade will figure out how to get the most out of Roy Williams.
Don't, though, get the idea because of this simple approach to football, or because he's rather understated or likes to fire off one-liners, that Wade Phillips is a soft guy. That players can take advantage of him.
"He's not going to get bullied," Hess said.