The 2012 NFL Draft and Free Agency Can't Solve the Dallas Cowboys' Issues

It's doesn't matter who walks out on the stage at the 2012 NFL Draft holding a Dallas Cowboys jersey.

Until the Dallas Cowboys address the lack of competent leadership on the sidelines, it doesn't matter who suits up in silver and blue. The Cowboys have underachieved for the past five seasons, and the amount of talent that has been wasted is obscene.

By now, Jerry Jones should have begun to recognize that it is not the players that have let him and the Cowboys' fans down, and with Wade Phillips leading the Texans to the top-ranked defense in the NFL last season, it should be clear that Wade isn't the problem.

But the Cowboys' humiliations continued under Jason Garrett's leadership. This one isn't even hard to see. And the 2011 season put Garrett's coaching under a microscope. Nothing more really needs to be said after the collapse that left Dallas once again out of the playoffs after being so close to locking in a home game in the playoffs.

The undisciplined play of the offense continued in 2011, and with Garrett now in charge of making decisions for the entire team, it was the collapse of the defense after Garrett's now famous "icing" of his own field-goal kicker that cost the Cowboys a game versus the Arizona Cardinals.

Is this really that hard for Jerry to see?

The Cowboys have routinely fielded some of the most talented players on their roster that the NFL have seen. Each year they see players that didn't make the grade on the Cowboy' roster become stars for one of the NFL's 31 other franchises.

Yet the Cowboys have become a joke in the NFL. Jerry Jones is the most humiliated man in America because of the way his Cowboys routinely build up hope that they are right on the brink of returning to glory, only to be drubbed on national television in front of a prime-time audience time and time again.

And every spring, Cowboys fans fight over who they believe the Cowboys should nab in free agency and how the upcoming NFL draft will fix the woes in Dallas. While the cure for what has ailed the Cowboys since 2007 is simple, the ability to put a finger on it seems to elude Jerry Jones and many Cowboys fans.

Get rid of Jason Garrett. This isn't even a hard one to figure out. Since the discipline instilled in the Cowboys' offense under Bill Parcells began to fade in the final quarter of the 2007 season, the Cowboys' offense has been a consistent disappointment. Garrett's inability to grasp the concept of consistency and discipline despite his call for those very things have been at the forefront of the problems that continue to haunt the Dallas Cowboys and their fans.

While Jerry may feel some misguided sense of "fatherly love" for Jason Garrett and some of his other present and former players, he should have never let that influence him in the way he has handled the Dallas Cowboys.

What has transpired in Dallas since 1995 should be a cautionary tale for businesses all over the world. After the success Jones enjoyed in the first seven years as the owner of the Cowboys in which Jimmy Johnson installed possibly the most dominant team ever assembled in the NFL, Jerry Jones proceeded to destroy everything that was built.

After his initial run of coaching changes immediately following the tragic parting of ways between Jimmy Johnson and the Cowboys, Jerry Jones seemed on the right track when he brought in Bill Parcells to rebuild the Cowboys once again. Discipline and determination replaced the frustration that Cowboys players had felt for the previous seven years under a variety of coaching changes, and in 2007 the Cowboys seemed on the verge of returning to glory once again.

But Bill Parcells retired, and Jerry made the biggest mistake to date with the Cowboys. He hired Jason Garrett to be the offensive head coach of the Cowboys, and in 2008 he made Garrett the highest-paid assistant coach in NFL history. While Wade Phillips ran the defense and wore the title of head coach, it was Jason Garrett who was positioning himself to take over when the opportunity to become the next head coach of the Cowboys presented itself.

After a disastrous start in 2010 that found the Cowboys at 1-7 after eight games, an embattled Wade Phillips was blamed and fired, and Garrett got his chance. While most thought that the defense was the reason that the Cowboys had collapsed, a closer look revealed that the collapse was almost entirely due to the inept mismanagement of the offense.

But it was too late. Jerry Jones was overly fond of Garrett, and this was the excuse he had been looking for to let the son of one of the Cowboys' former scouts finally take the reigns. While visions of Tom Landry II danced in Jerry's head—and some of the Cowboys fans as well—the real truth was about to come crashing down in Dallas.

Jason Garrett's apparent lack of instincts and failure to achieve a consistent level of performance, coupled with a seeming "let's try this" mentality when it came to play-calling and philosophy. have left the Cowboys in disarray. The 2011 season was a terrifying look at what could be the Cowboys' future for the next several years if Jerry Jones remains insistent on looking for blame everywhere but with Jason Garrett.

Even Garrett's catchphrase of "let's be great today" seems to be an ominous sign that he just doesn't get it. Greatness isn't a decision, but it is an achievement. It is greatness that a person or an organization hopes to achieve through discipline, determination, knowledge and extraordinary effort.

The Cowboys can't return to greatness because they have no one in place that can show them how to achieve it. And while the Cowboys' coaches, players and the media continue to rave about the need for swagger and leadership from the players, it has become painfully obvious that no one in the coaching staff understands what either swagger or leadership mean.

With the real weakness of the Dallas Cowboys remaining on the sidelines wearing a headset, it doesn't matter who they grab in the 2012 draft.

Because if the leadership on the sidelines doesn't understand how to get the team where they want to go, the draft will merely add more players to a floundering franchise.

That's the bottom line.