Despite a seismic NFL trade, the first full week of NHL season, and the spectacular MLB playoffs, the country still can’t stop talking about an underwhelming Cowboys team heading into its bye week.
No one aside from Jerral Wayne Jones knows for certain if keeping the team in the spotlight was the aim of a radio hit as oblivious as it was embarrassing, or merely a happy byproduct. Still, you glean positives wherever you can when your football team is on the front nine of a doomed season. That’s especially true when its shortcomings are mostly your fault.
For the uninitiated, Jerry’s weekly Tuesday morning chat with 105.3 The Fan careened off the rails after he was asked whether an offseason that scanned as far too passive to everyone without the surname Jones could be blamed for Dallas’ patchwork roster getting humiliated by Detroit.
As in, why don’t you try doing my job and see how it goes?-levels of careening.
Let’s sit down and literally review all my good decisions against my bad ones and keep score-levels of careening.
Keep talking about this, and I’m gonna fire the hosts, whether or not I technically have the authority to do so-levels of careening, which was about the point at which this should be categorized less as careening than a 12-car wreck.
Here’s the pertinent audio:
And the transcript, should you need further verification that, yes, Jerry Jones threatened to fire radio hosts not under his employ on an otherwise sleepy Tuesday morning:
Peeved as Jones sometimes can be, this is a different level of upset. There is a strong case to be made—and friend of the program Saad Yousuf makes it well, using Jerry’s own words from training camp—that it was premeditated, whether to gin up attention (likely) or position his newly 82-year-old body in front of the firing line (plausible). Perhaps it’s a bit of both, along with a third component: the through line of the Super Bowl drought approaching three decades long.
Three summers ago, while conducting a mostly bullshit-ridden opening presser at the start of training camp in Oxnard, Jones was questioned about a different Cowboys failure. He responded with the following:
“My curse is I don’t spend a lot of time on my mess-ups or what didn’t go right,” Jones replied. “ … I really do go to the successes.”
I wrote that day about the lessons that go unheeded when self-reflection is cast aside in favor of self-delusion. I won’t rehash it because nothing has changed in the last two years, just as nothing is liable to change over the next two. This man is who he is, irretrievably beholden to the right things in business and the wrong ones in football. We have endured enough seasons of loud soundbites and quiet off seasons, skyrocketing profits and plummeting on-field relevance, to understand Jones’ definition of Cowboys success. It does not match that of the wider public, and it never will.
Is there a way to marry the two? Probably. But there is no path without the hard work that Jerry remains so disinterested in doing, which makes the intent behind today’s soundbites irrelevant. Maybe he meant to self-combust. Maybe he didn’t. But every move he makes as this franchise’s general manager, whether plotted out or meandering, inevitably circles the Cowboys back to the same place, so far away from that elusive Super Bowl. You can’t go forward without making sure your feet are pointed away from where you started.
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