With a record of 11-14-1, Brian Schottenheimer unofficially ranks in the top five of NFL Coaches Most Likely To Be Fired After the Season, according to www.ThingsThatFeelTrue.com.

Schottenheimer has eight more games.

Eight more games to prove he’s the right guy for the job.

Eight more games to prove his first 26 as the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys are not a complete reflection of his abilities, and future.

Two men who have lived in his world, and are now paid to talk about people who occupy the jobs they once had, offer a more balanced view of Schottenheimer’s predicament than the four-letter-word-spewing fan. You might even say they’re “sympathetic,” but for the sake of discussion, go with “realistic.”

On Wednesday, former Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett and former Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin, who are now NFL analysts for NBC Sports, were available on a conference call with interested media.

“The Cowboys [are] up and down, but they’re in a division that is still winnable at this point,” Garrett said. “The Cowboys still have the best offensive skill in the division. They have the best quarterback in the division. And their defense is not what they’ve wanted it to be, but they’ve shown some signs where they’ve made some stops at critical moments, particularly last week at the end of the Colts game.

“Like with every team in the league, there’s a lot of blame to be spread around, but the ultimate question is, ‘What are you going to do now?’ Let yourself make the corrections and go forward. There’s a lot of reason to hope and believe they can stay in the fight in the NFC East. That’s really what the focus needs to be.”

From this duo, I wanted to know the answer to one question: Are the Cowboys where they are now because they are not well-coached?

Garrett on if the Cowboys are ‘well-coached’

Just as he was as a coach, Garrett remains mostly measured since he became an analyst for NBC. However publicly conservative he was in his 10 years as the head coach of the Cowboys, he has loosened up to offer more constructive, and instructive, insight rather than all-out bear attacks as a commentator.

“For me, I always think it’s a combination,” Garrett said. “You can probably look at some situations they’ve had this year for you as a coach to pull back and say, ‘We could have handled that differently. Maybe we weren’t quite as prepared as we needed to be for that.’

“Then you come back the next week, ‘Hey, we’ve got to hone in. If that comes up again, we’ve got to get it addressed.’ And another part of that is there are times the players have the same situation: ‘Hey, I’ve got to make that throw, that tackle, that catch, whatever that thing is.’ ”

One part to this that Garrett can relate to, he knows some of the Cowboys’ 4-5 record is coaching. And he knows some of this is the players simply aren’t good enough.

What he also knows is that players get frustrated with their coaches just as easily, if not more, than the coaches do with their players. Riding that out, and smoothing those feelings over, is a key function for a coach to be successful.

While Garrett never did reach an NFC title game in his tenure, the team mostly was with him, and played for him, throughout. There was respect, even if there was frustration.

It was similar with his successor, Mike McCarthy, who in his five years with the team enjoyed three straight 12-5 seasons, which have been a high point for this franchise over the past decade.

Thus far under Schottenheimer, the Cowboys are not close to the standards set by Garrett or McCarthy.

“The players have to take responsibility,” Garrett said. “The best teams I’ve been around as a player and a coach, everyone kind of looks inward first, and you look at yourself as a coach and say, ‘Boy, that plan wasn’t what we needed it to be,’ or, ‘We need to handle that situation better,’ and the players are doing the same kind of thing.”

Tomlin’s view of the coaching of the Cowboys

If Garrett is instructive as an NFL TV analyst, Tomlin’s new job in front of the camera has made him a star, complete with an appearance on the late night entertainment talk shows. Tomlin has unleashed a part of his personality that he kept mostly hidden in his 19 seasons in Pittsburgh.

Tomlin’s time with the Steelers, where the team never finished under .500 once, did not generate the level of criticism, and noise, that Garrett, and now Schottenheimer, know. Because the Steelers were “around it” all the time. Because they’re the Steelers, and not the Cowboys.

The type of criticism that Schottenheimer is hearing, Tomlin did not, but it doesn’t mean he’s immune from the chatter.

“Any time there’s failure and inconsistency, it’s always playing and coaching issues. That’s been my experience,” Tomlin said. “I also look at it from the perspective of it’s like being a head coach and a quarterback. Oftentimes you get too much credit when things are going well and too much blame when things aren’t.

“I just think that there’s a certain amount of tension that comes with being the Cowboys, sometimes justly so, sometimes unjustly so.

“I’m sure Coach Schottenheimer and all parties involved are conditioned and used to that. They’re insulating themselves from it. I’m sure they’re all focused on what they need to do to improve and find consistency, rather than addressing the noise, which is probably always louder outside than it is inside.”

That feels true, just as much as Brian Schottenheimer has eight more games to change the perception that his team is not well-coached.

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