Barry Switzer, Dallas' last title coach, still kicking (expletive)

This offseason, Shutdown Corner will travel down memory lane with a series of stories presenting some interesting and sometimes forgotten stories from the NFL's past. Join us as we relive some of the greatest and craziest moments in the sport's history.

Barry Switzer will interrupt you at times. He’ll swear a lot, so hope you don’t mind that.

And the former Dallas Cowboys and Oklahoma coach will tell you what he thinks. Always.

“I came from Oklahoma, and most of the writers there were Southwest Conference guys,” Switzer said this week, when asked about the media heat that was constantly on him as Cowboys coach. “And I kicked Texas’[expletive] when we played at the Cotton Bowl when I was at Oklahoma. We recruited most of the kids out of Texas and I was kicking their [expletive] with Texas kids. So many of the writers didn’t like me already.”

To say this is Switzer unplugged would be wrong because that would mean that at some point there was a plug.

At 78, Switzer is just as you remember him, still outspoken in that recognizable southern drawl and unapologetic for everything he has to say.

Take this tale. He’s asked about going for it on fourth-and-1 at Philadelphia. In 1995, long before Bill Belichick became synonymous with going for it on fourth down in your own territory, Switzer did it. Late in a 17-17 game against the Eagles, at their own 29, the Cowboys went for it and a run to the left got stuffed. However, the Cowboys were saved — the two-minute warning came before the snap, so the play was dead. Then after the two-minute warning, the Cowboys ran the exact same play. It was stuffed again, and the Eagles went on to win.

Remember the heat the Indianapolis Colts got for that weird trick punt play last year? That was Switzer after the Eagles loss in 1995, and maybe worse. It was such a big deal, reporters asked Cowboys owner Jerry Jones if he had plans to fire Switzer after the season. Switzer’s record was 22-8 at that moment.

Hold on, Switzer has something to say.

“People say it was fourth-and-1. If it was fourth-and-1 I’d have kicked the son of a [expletive],” Switzer said. “It was fourth and 3 inches!

“After the first one you don’t all of a sudden change your mind and say, ‘I don’t trust you guys anymore.’ And everyone wanted to go for it, Michael [Irvin], Troy [Aikman], Emmitt [Smith] were all saying, 'Let’s go for it, coach.'”

Switzer will add the postscript.

“I end the discussion with this: Who won the [expletive] Super Bowl that year? I don’t believe it was Philadelphia,” Switzer said, knowing the Cowboys won all five games after fourth-and-1, finishing in Super Bowl XXX.

“I get the last laugh on that one.”

Didn’t Switzer get the last laugh on everyone?

There are only 31 men who have coached a Super Bowl champion. Switzer is one. There are three men who have won a national title in college and a Super Bowl: Jimmy Johnson, Pete Carroll and Switzer.

His .625 win percentage in the NFL is 23rd all time, better than Bill Walsh, Joe Gibbs, Bud Grant and Tom Landry, to name a few. He coached 20 seasons in college and the pros and his only losing season was his last one, his fourth in Dallas. He was fired after that. The Cowboys haven’t been back to the Super Bowl since.

“I won a Super Bowl. I’ve got the best win percentage of anyone who coached the Cowboys,” Switzer said to a question about whether he gets enough credit for the job he did with Dallas. “So I don’t care. It’s irrelevant.”

Switzer’s Cowboys tenure is one of the most unusual in NFL lore. The Cowboys had an opening after the 1993 season because Jones and Johnson couldn’t get along anymore. Switzer hadn’t coached since the end of the 1988 season and had never coached in the NFL. But he and Jones were friends since Switzer was a young coach at Arkansas and Jones played there. Switzer said he probably wouldn't have taken any other job, but couldn't say no when his old friend Jones asked.

That’s how Switzer, a legendary college coach who had been off for five seasons and had no NFL experience, took over the two-time defending Super Bowl champions. It was a no-win situation in many ways for Switzer.

If he won, it was because he took over an already great team. If he lost, well, he totally screwed it up. And people piled on him from the beginning.

“I was Bozo the Clown, I was the guy they could beat up,” Switzer said.

Like the time the Cowboys lost to the San Francisco 49ers in the NFC championship game at the end of the 1994 season, in part because the Cowboys left too much time for 49ers receiver Jerry Rice to score a touchdown in the final seconds of the first half.

“I said to our offensive coordinator, Ernie Zampese, ‘Run the ball three times,’” Switzer interrupts, clarifying how the Cowboys left too much time on the clock. “He was saying, ‘We just scored, we can keep it going.’ I should have told him, ‘You run the ball three straight times or I’ll fire your [expletive] right now.’ I let him talk me into it. He sold me on being a gambler. If we had done what my gut told me to do … “

And there was the Philadelphia fourth-down controversy, after which Jones was asked if his 22-8 coach would be fired if the Cowboys didn’t win the Super Bowl.

"There won't be any coaching changes," Jones said then, according to The New York Times. "He'll be back next year. Definitely."

“That’s the question people wanted to ask Jerry all the time,” Switzer said with a laugh. “You know how writers love controversies. It didn’t bother Jerry or me. I laughed at it.”

Switzer, despite his comments about kicking Texas' behind and the writers not liking him for it, said all he asked was that the media treated him fairly, and many did. It’s also probably safe to say that few coaches in the past 25 years in the NFL got the kind of scrutiny Switzer did, in that market, leading that great team.

“I never worried about pressure,” Switzer said. “[Expletive], you win or lose and if you lose, your [expletive] is probably going to get fired. Coaches don’t sit around worrying about that.”

He eventually resigned after a 6-10 season in 1997, although everyone assumed he was under pressure from Jones to quit. There was an infamous incident before the 1997 season in which Switzer was caught at the airport with a loaded gun in his carry-on bag, and people point to that as the beginning of the end. Not so, Switzer said. Key injuries and the resulting record were the culprits, and not the gun issue in which “the media was killing gnats with a sledgehammer,” in his words.

"The players laughed their [expletives] off about it.”

When you think about Switzer’s time with the Cowboys now, how much credit do you give him for that Super Bowl? For many, the perception is that Switzer got on the train when it was going full speed and rode it all the way to a ring. That Cowboys team Switzer took over might have been the most talented in NFL history, or is at least on a short list. And Switzer freely admits that, yeah, he inherited a great team. So what?

“Every coach inherits a team,” Switzer said. “Jimmy [Johnson] went to Miami and inherited a national title team from Howard Schnellenberger. How come nobody mentions that?”

After 1997, Switzer never coached again. “Nobody knocked down my door and I wasn’t interested anyway,” Switzer said. And that’s fine. Although Switzer says he loved the college game more, for the enduring relationships he made, he enjoyed the four Cowboys seasons. Despite the ridiculous pressure and the microscope he was under, he and his team had a lot of fun.

“Oh hell yeah we did!” Switzer interrupts.

And if you want to avoid giving Switzer his fair credit for those 40 regular-season and five playoff wins, and for winning Super Bowl XXX, that’s not something he’s worried about these days. In one breath he’ll say all the success was due to the players and assistant coaches and even Jones for “signing those huge checks” to get players like Deion Sanders, but Switzer also knows what he accomplished. Talented players or not, there was never any guarantee of a Super Bowl ring in Dallas.

“I could have lost,” Switzer said. “But I didn’t.”

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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdown.corner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab