3 Cowboys’ assistants mentioned as potential NFL head coaches
The downside of taking the league by storm, throttling opposing defenses in creatively-fueled point-and-yardage explosions, stifling enemy offenses with a blitzing swarm of takeaway specialists, and becoming the trendy midseason pick for a Super Bowl appearance is that all the other teams start looking to the coaches responsible. Maybe one of those successful staffers is just the spark needed to turn a foundering franchise around by handing them their own keys to a kingdom.
Even if the Cowboys fall flat on their faces for the remaining eight games of their season, they’ve shown enough tantalizing potential during their first nine to draw sizable interest from teams who’ll be making a change in the offseason.
NFL.com’s Tom Pelissero looked across the league and throughout the college ranks to identify the assistants who may be due to get their own shot in 2022. Not surprisingly, several Cowboys staffers made the list.
Defensive coordinator Dan Quinn
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Quinn is an obvious choice for someone to interview. The 51-year-old has been a head coach before, at his most recent stop of Atlanta. A sharp defensive mind who came up through the ranks, he made a name for himself as the architect of Seattle’s famed Legion of Boom unit. In his first season there, the Seahawks ranked No. 1 in fewest points allowed, fewest yards allowed, and takeaways. The first team since the 1985 Bears to accomplish that feat, they went on to win Super Bowl XLVIII.
That success earned Quinn the head job in Atlanta. Under his watch, the team made the Super Bowl in just his second season and were 23 minutes away from a championship when they suffered an epic collapse. Quinn coached 53 more games for the Falcons before being fired in early 2020.
Now in his first season with the Cowboys, Quinn has quickly turned around the worst defense in franchise history. His players love him, he convinced several former players to follow him to Dallas, he’s made brilliant moves with young players like Micah Parsons and Trevon Diggs, and he uses a big-picture teaching approach that resonates with everyone in the locker room. It’s hard to imagine that Quinn won’t be courted seriously in the coming offseason.
Offensive coordinator Kellen Moore
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Moore is already a hot name when it comes to identifying the next young Sean McVay-esque mastermind. The 33-year-old, in his third season in the role, catapulted onto the Cowboys staff as quarterbacks coach in 2018, immediately after a playing career that saw him get into three games over six seasons with Detroit and Dallas.
A prolific record-setting college passer at Boise State, Moore came from a coaching family and famously collected playbooks growing up. After leading the anything-goes Broncos in college, Moore proved himself to be an offensive wunderkind at the pro level, even when he was still wearing shoulder pads and holding a clipboard. Hired to the Dallas staff under Jason Garrett, Moore kept the OC job when Mike McCarthy came to town and has shown himself to be one of the most creative sideline minds in the game.
Moore got serious looks after the 2020 season, both from his alma mater and the Philadelphia Eagles. With the Cowboys currently leading the NFL in yards per game and points per game, he’s sure to be a popular interview candidate again. “Like many really young coaches, Moore has a lot to learn in terms of the whole picture of running a program,” Pelissero writes. “He would need a good plan for his staff and to surround himself with experienced people. But the tools are there.”
Defensive line coach Aden Durde
(AP Photo/Roger Steinman)
The English-born Durde was a breakout star of HBO’s Hard Knocks series. What first attracted audiences to him may have been his thick British accent, but savvy fans were quick to also recognize his prowess at teaching football, American style.
The 42-year-old picked up the sport with the London Olympians and played with teams in Scotland, Carolina, Hamburg, and Kansas City over just a handful of years. A decade after hanging up his cleats, Durde served as the head of football development at NFLUK, helping to guide the league’s International Player Pathway program. He was also defensive coordinator of the London Warriors for six seasons. Then he was hired by the Atlanta Falcons in 2018 (under Dan Quinn) as a defensive quality control coach; he moved to outside linebackers coach in 2020. Quinn brought him to Dallas in January of 2021.
Pelissero lists Durde as someone to watch in coming years as a coaching candidate. As the league continues to move toward what feels like an inevitable franchise based in London, it would be hard to imagine Durde not being considered as a frontrunner for a coaching gig there, given his deep ties and history with the NFL’s outreach program in the United Kingdom. But that may still be a ways off, both for the league and for Durde.
“I think looking ahead is something I don’t want right now,” Durde said just last month, “because I feel that you can get yourself in a jam. And you can get yourself trying to chase things that aren’t really there and get even bitter about things. I’m really happy where I am.”
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