Jason Garrett’s Cowboys Career: From Backup QB to Head Coach to Broadcast Booth
Jim Garrett spent 21 years scouting players for the Dallas Cowboys. His son Jason spent the next 20 playing for them, coaching them, and eventually becoming the second-winningest head coach in franchise history. That’s not a coincidence – it’s a dynasty that never quite finished the job.
Three Super Bowls Before He Was Even a Coach
Jason Garrett came out of Princeton in 1989 as an undrafted free agent and bounced around the fringes of professional football for three years before the Cowboys signed him to their practice squad in 1992. He was the third-string quarterback. His father, Jim, was on the scouting staff. Whether that connection helped him get a look is a question the family never addressed directly – but the timing was what it was.
What happened after that had nothing to do with nepotism. In eight seasons as a Dallas backup, Garrett won three Super Bowls alongside Troy Aikman (1992, 1993, 1995), started nine of the 23 games he appeared in, and completed 165 of 294 passes for 2,042 yards. Those aren’t starter numbers, obviously. But Garrett understood what it meant to be inside a winning organization, and that experience became the foundation for everything that followed.
The 1994 Thanksgiving Game – His Best Day as a Player
Rodney Peete sprained his thumb. Dallas needed a starter for Thanksgiving against the Green Bay Packers. Garrett got the call and was down by 17 points going into the second half. What followed was one of the better performances in the history of Texas Stadium: 15 of 26 passes, 311 yards, two touchdown passes, a 42-31 comeback win. He earned NFC Offensive Player of the Week. ESPN later named it one of the four best moments in the history of that stadium.
He never really came close to matching it as a player. That’s not a knock – most backup quarterbacks never get a game like that at all.
The Coaching Path: Miami, Then Back to Dallas
After retiring as a player following the 2004 season, Garrett became the quarterbacks coach for the Miami Dolphins under Nick Saban in 2005, working with Daunte Culpepper and Joey Harrington. It was unremarkable work on an unremarkable team. Then, in January 2007, the Cowboys brought him back as offensive coordinator under Wade Phillips.
His first year running the Dallas offense produced the second-best offense in the NFL and a 13-3 regular season record. Suddenly he was getting head coaching interviews – Baltimore, Atlanta – and both franchises offered him the job. He turned them both down and stayed in Dallas. Jerry Jones responded by making him the highest-paid assistant coach in professional football, at roughly $3 million for the 2008 season.
In November 2010, with Dallas sitting at 1-7, Jones fired Phillips and handed Garrett the interim job. He went 5-3 the rest of the way. On January 6, 2011, Garrett became the eighth head coach in Cowboys history – the first former Dallas player to hold the position.
The 8-8 Years – Not the Whole Story, But Not Nothing Either
Three consecutive 8-8 seasons from 2011 through 2013. Each one ended with Dallas losing a de facto NFC East title game in the final week of the regular season – to the Giants in 2011, the Redskins in 2012, the Eagles in 2013. That’s not bad luck three times in a row. That’s a pattern.
The critics were not wrong about this. When the division title comes down to Week 17 and you lose all three, something is consistently breaking down at the worst moment. And yet the Cowboys weren’t losing games they were supposed to win against bad teams – they were competitive, just not able to close. That distinction matters, but it only goes so far.
2014: The Year It Looked Like It Was Going to Work
DeMarco Murray ran for 1,845 yards. The offensive line – Tyron Smith, Zack Martin, Travis Frederick – was arguably the best unit in football. Dallas went 12-4, won the NFC East outright, and hosted the Detroit Lions in the Wild Card round. Garrett looked, for the first time, like a genuine championship-caliber head coach.
The Lions game had the infamous flag pick-up on a pass interference penalty during a late Detroit drive, which changed the game’s momentum and helped Dallas survive 24-20. Then came Green Bay in the divisional round. Dez Bryant caught a pass on fourth-and-2 at the Packers’ 32-yard line, went to his knees and stretched toward the end zone, and the officials overturned the ruling on the field. Not a catch. Game over. Cowboys out.
That call is still argued in Dallas. What’s harder to argue: the Cowboys had a 12-4 team and one playoff win to show for it.
2016: His Best Season, His Least Satisfying Ending
Dak Prescott went undrafted in the fourth round. Ezekiel Elliott was a first-round pick from Ohio State. By the end of their rookie year, Prescott had set multiple franchise passing records for a first-year quarterback and earned AP Offensive Rookie of the Year. Elliott won the NFL rushing title with 1,631 yards – fifth-most by a rookie since the merger – on 322 carries and 15 touchdowns. Dallas went 13-3, the best record in the NFC, earned the number one seed.
The Associated Press named Garrett its NFL Coach of the Year.
Green Bay came to AT&T Stadium in the divisional round. Aaron Rodgers threw a Hail Mary to tie the game at the end of the first half. The Packers won on a walk-off field goal by Mason Crosby. Again. Divisional round. Against Green Bay. Again.
The Clapping – What It Actually Represented
There is a version of the clapping story that is unfair to Garrett. He clapped on the sideline after bad plays and good ones, in victories and blowout losses, at practice and in games – and fans turned it into a symbol of emotional indifference. As if the problem with the Dallas Cowboys was that their coach looked too calm.
But there’s a version of the story that holds up. When ESPN’s Ian Fitzspatrick wrote about Garrett in 2019, he described a coach who “has never lost control of his team” – which is true – alongside a coach who presided over 25 years without an NFC Championship appearance from a franchise with the budget, the talent, and the pressure to demand one. The clapping bothered people because it looked like contentment. On a team that hadn’t reached a conference title game since 1995, contentment read as a problem.
In October 2019, against the Packers, Garrett slammed his challenge flag at the feet of an official and let loose a string of words that earned him an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. The building erupted. His players responded. The Cowboys nearly came back from 28 points down before Brett Maher missed a field goal. They lost. But something shifted in how the crowd saw him – briefly, at least.
Jerry Jones and the Structural Problem No Coach Could Fully Solve
Over the course of Garrett’s tenure, the Cowboys wasted approximately $154 million in dead cap money – contracts paid to players who were no longer on the roster. In five of his seasons, Dallas ranked in the top five for most dead money in the league. That’s not a coaching failure. That’s an ownership and front office failure that Garrett had to build around.
Jones kept him employed through three 8-8 seasons, through the playoff disappointments, through years when the fan base and media were calling for a change. He believed in what Garrett was building. Then, after the 2019 8-8 finish, he let the contract expire. “Jason Garrett’s legacy with the Dallas Cowboys will always be that of someone who strived for greatness every day,” Jones said in his parting statement. That’s a warm send-off. It’s also the kind of thing you say about someone who wasn’t quite enough.
His Record, Fairly Read
Final regular season record as Cowboys head coach: 85-67. Three NFC East titles (2014, 2016, 2018). Three playoff appearances. Playoff record: 2-3. Never reached an NFC Championship Game. Second-most wins by a head coach in franchise history, behind only Tom Landry.
The roster during those years included Dak Prescott, Ezekiel Elliott, Jason Witten, Dez Bryant, Tony Romo, DeMarco Murray, Amari Cooper, Tyron Smith, Zack Martin, Travis Frederick, DeMarcus Lawrence, and Jaylon Smith. Of those, five have been named first-team All-Pro at some point. The Cowboys had the most wins in the NFC from 2016 through 2019 – 32. That’s not the same conference as the AFC, where New England made things difficult for everyone, but it’s not nothing.
What makes his tenure genuinely hard to assess is that the talent was good enough to reach the Super Bowl in multiple windows – 2014 and 2016 in particular – and both windows closed in the divisional round. That’s not all on Garrett. The Dez catch ruling in 2014 was a disaster no coach could have anticipated or prevented. But the pattern across nine seasons of falling short in January, with first-ballot Hall of Fame talent on the roster, reflects something. Exactly what is the honest debate.
2018: His Best Coaching Job, Least Remembered
After losing five of seven games mid-season and sitting at 3-5 in November 2018, the Cowboys traded for Amari Cooper, turned their offense around, and won seven of their last eight regular season games to take the NFC East at 10-6. No team had ever made the playoffs after starting 3-5 under Garrett. It was his most impressive mid-season correction as a head coach.
The LA Rams beat them 30-22 in the divisional round. Sean McVay out-schemed the Dallas defense throughout. Garrett had nothing left after that. One more shot in 2019, 8-8, out in Week 17.
After Dallas: The Giants, Then the Broadcast Booth
Joe Judge hired Garrett as offensive coordinator for the New York Giants in 2020. The Giants went 6-10. Their offense ranked 28th in points scored. Garrett left after one season. Whatever the reasons – Judge’s offensive system, the talent gap, the adjustment to a different organization – it was a rough landing after a decade of leading his own program.
In 2022, NBC Sports hired him as a studio analyst for Football Night in America and a game analyst for Notre Dame football. He’s been there since. In January 2026, he interviewed with the Tennessee Titans for their head coaching vacancy – Robert Saleh got the job – which confirmed what most people who watched him on television already suspected: he hasn’t ruled out a return to the sideline.
He and his wife Brill established Jason Garrett Starfish Charities back in 1997, which runs a football camp and leadership forum at Princeton each June and launched the Starfish Leadership Academy in 2022. That part of his life has stayed consistent across everything else that changed.
Where He Sits in Cowboys History
Tom Landry coached Dallas for 29 seasons and won two Super Bowls. Jimmy Johnson won back-to-back championships and left after four years. Barry Switzer inherited Johnson’s roster and won one more. Bill Parcells went 34-34 in four seasons and walked away. Wade Phillips was fired at 1-7.
Garrett lasted longer than any of them except Landry, won more regular season games than all of them except Landry, and never came close to a Super Bowl. That combination – sustained competence without a championship – is either a respectable career or a wasted decade depending on how you weight the evidence. Cowboys fans split almost exactly down the middle on it, and have for years.
What’s harder to dispute: the franchise still hasn’t reached an NFC Championship Game since the 1995 season. That’s not Garrett’s fault alone. But he had nine seasons and some of the best rosters in the conference to change it, and he didn’t. That’s the number that lingers.
Comments