Brian Schottenheimer’s start with the Cowboys has put him in a corner of franchise history he probably didn’t want to visit.
Through five games, Dallas has not won a majority under Schottenheimer in either of his first two seasons on the sideline. That alone is enough to place him in a bleak little club inside Cowboys lore, one that now includes only a handful of head coaches who opened consecutive seasons with two or fewer wins through their first five games.
The group is short and not exactly flattering: Brian Schottenheimer, Jason Garrett, Dave Campo, Jimmy Johnson and Tom Landry.
That framing matters because the Cowboys are now 24-for-24 in the “two or fewer wins through five games” category across franchise history, and only twice in the previous 23 such instances did they make the playoffs. The number is ugly, and it gets uglier when you zoom in on the repeated slow starts.
Schottenheimer has now led Dallas through a full season and five games of a second without getting past that first-five-game threshold in a meaningful way. The source of the comparison is also specific: Stathead and Pro Football Reference only allow spans to begin with at least five games, which is why this is the cleanest way to measure where he stands against past Cowboys coaches.
And yes, there is a small technical wrinkle here. A 2-2-1 start is not the same thing as 2-3. But in the practical sense, the record still leaves Schottenheimer in the same bucket.
That’s where the conversation turns uncomfortable. Some will point out that Jimmy Johnson and Tom Landry were operating in very different circumstances, and that fair point is baked into the discussion. Schottenheimer, by contrast, did not take over an expansion team or a roster holding the No. 1 overall pick.
So for now, the Cowboys are sitting with a start that’s dragging Schottenheimer toward the wrong kind of company. If he doesn’t straighten things out, his name is going to keep showing up alongside coaches Dallas fans remember for all the wrong reasons.
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Spencers story still carries the what-if feeling that follows so many promising Cowboys careers. He reached the Pro Bowl in 2012 and flashed the kind of production that suggested even more could have been ahead, but the injuries that followed changed the arc of what had been a steady ascent. For a player associated with both impact and unfinished business, No. 93 has stayed memorable in Dallas in a way that goes beyond the numbers. [Read more 🡒]