The Nfl

The Little Things
Detail-oriented Chan Gailey is making a big difference in Dallas

Chan Gailey didn't raise his voice. His tone wasn't demeaning, just emphatic. It was the same tone that the Cowboys' coach had used three months earlier when he told his players that they couldn't be late for meetings anymore and couldn't miss weigh-ins anymore and had to adhere to a precise schedule for the first time since Barry Switzer took over for Jimmy Johnson after the 1993 season.

"In this game against the Cardinals, I want no presnap penalties, no false starts, no offsides, no illegal formations," Gailey said to his team last week before its NFC East showdown at Arizona. "I can understand when a face-mask penalty or a hold happens. But I will not accept any more presnap penalties. They show a lack of concentration."

Dallas scored on four of its first six possessions, racing to a 28-0 lead without committing any presnap penalties. The only such miscue came 37 minutes into the game, when tight end David LaFleur flinched before a snap. "That's the way it should be," Gailey said matter-of-factly, sitting by his locker after the Cowboys' harrowing 35-28 win. "If you're a smart team—and you have to be to win consistently—you don't commit those penalties. I try not to make frivolous statements to the team. I want them to know that everything I do has a direct correlation to winning."

Granted, the NFC East is probably the weakest it's been since the 1970 merger. But the fact that the Cowboys are 7-3 under Gailey after going 6-10 in Switzer's final year-makes two things clear: One, hiring micromanager Gailey was the smartest move Jerry Jones has made since he paid Deion Sanders $5 million a year to sign as a free agent in 1995. Two, keeping Switzer for four years was the dumbest thing Jones has done since he bought the Cowboys in February 1989.

But Jones sees the light now. Sitting on a couch in his Phoenix hotel suite last Saturday night, he confessed as much—that the Cowboys would have been far better off if he had made the painful decision to jettison Switzer after two or three years. "I realize it's easy to say now," Jones said, "but if I had it to do over again, I'd have made the change after we won the '95 Super Bowl. The way he was critiqued after that [27-17 win over the Steelers] wasn't good for him. At the time I thought not making a change was our best chance to keep winning. But watching Chan work, the wisdom of making a change has been reinforced time and again this year. His attention to every detail, his work ethic, what he's done with our offense—he's better than I could have ever imagined."

Right after the Cowboys broke training camp, Gailey laid down his rules. Among other things, he announced that a team meeting would be held every Monday at 12:30 p.m. In Week 1, two players were a couple of minutes late. "This is your grace period," Gailey told them. "Don't test me again." In the 10 Mondays since, no one has been late.

"It's not just our Monday meeting," Gailey says, "it's every meeting." That's quite a change from the days of the Switzer regime, when players repeatedly straggled into meetings late but went unpunished.

The players are convinced that the renewed attention to discipline has translated into victories. After going 3-5 in the NFC East last year, Dallas is 6-0 this season. When the Cowboys bolted to their big lead on Sunday, Cardinals quarterback Jake Plummer went to the no-huddle and ran up most of his career-high 465 passing yards against a depleted secondary. (Sanders had a sprained big toe and sat out two quarters, and fellow cornerback Kevin Smith played on after separating his left shoulder in the second period.) Plummer drove Arizona to the Dallas five with 11 seconds left, but his last two passes fell incomplete.

"In the first half you looked like the '93 Cowboys," a reporter said to guard Nate Newton, referring to the team that won a second straight Super Bowl for Dallas.