One oddsmaker has Jason Garrett as ninth-most likely to be first head coach fired

Tale as old as time, at least one NFL coach is always fired in the middle of the season.

Typically the first head coach to meet the turk is captaining a squad who’s demise has already been met. You know the kind, a team that’s sitting something around 2-8, and a coordinator finishes the job while draft season starts in November.

It’s this exact sequence that played out eight years ago when Jerry Jones fired Wade Phillips after a demoralizing loss to the eventual Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers (it really is amazing how interlinked Aaron Rodgers is with Cowboys history, by the way) that ultimately led to Jason Garrett becoming the man in charge of the Cowboys. Despite an impressive campaign two years ago and a 9-7 record last season, Garrett himself is being marked as a potential coach to meet an ill fate in 2018.

The names at the top of this list aren’t surprising. Hue Jackson has won one game in two seasons. Adam Gase hasn’t exactly returned the Dolphins to glory. Marvin Lewis is, well, sometimes this is too easy.

These aren’t exactly good odds that Garrett will be the first head coach fired, but they are the ninth-most. Dallas isn’t necessarily predicted to be a powerhouse this season either, but it’s worth noting that they are in the top half of the NFL when it comes to projected odds to win the Super Bowl as well.

There’s no denying that Jason Garrett faced a hardship throughout the 2017 season with the Cowboys. They suffered the worst loss ever at AT&T Stadium. They went three consecutive games scoring in the single digits, something that had literally never been done in the history of the Dallas Cowboys. There were hard times last season to say the last.

The national pendulum of Jason Garrett has swung wildly back and forth over the last 1,000 days or so. Each of the last three seasons of work have been wild for their own respective reasons, so much so that you can definitely understand how Garrett is effectively out of any sort of excuse that could be drummed up.

It feels like Garrett is going to need to win, at the very least, a playoff game (or two) and/or reach the NFC Championship Game for perception around him to be that he shouldn’t be fired. The road is going to be difficult considering he shares a division with the reigning world champion Philadelphia Eagles, although the Cowboys do have the second-best odds at winning the NFC East.

Jason Garrett has been given a lot of time to make his mark with the Dallas Cowboys. A season without Jason Witten and Dez Bryant will focus on his face as one of the more seasoned on the sidelines. Can he pull it off, or do these odds have a point?