Game Over 
The Devil and Mr. Jones
When Jerry Jones fired Jimmy Johnson, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys sold his soul to prove that he's in charge. Now his ego has made America's Team an NFL laughingstock, but it's fans like me who are in hell.
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"Last year," I said, "you were making noises about going back to the Super Bowl in 2000. What happened?"
"I really thought we had loaded the wagon last year," he admitted. "We had the fastest receivers in the league. I had brought in Galloway. James McKnight was coming back, and we had Rocket Ismail. We had a great running game, a good, young offensive line, the best defensive line we've ever had. Then Aikman was knocked out in the first game. He was never the same after that."
Galloway also went down with a season-ending knee injury in that first game, and Ismail was lost after game ten. In retrospect, I asked Jones, did he regret trading two number ones for Galloway?
"Yes," he said without hesitation. "But at the time, I had no way of knowing that Troy wasn't part of our future."
I reminded Jones that he had been one of the champions of the salary cap, which the owners got as a trade-off for free agency with the NFL Players Association. Now it was coming back to bite him in the ass. In his desperate attempt to win a Super Bowl while Jimmy Johnson's body was still warm, he had lavished huge, long-term contracts on a few superstars. This strategy worked only to bankrupt the franchise, at least in terms of what is possible under the cap. More than $24 million—or one third of the current payroll—is dead money, which means it is dedicated to players no longer on the team. The absent recipients included not only recent Cowboys such as Aikman, Irvin, and Sanders but also long-vanished names like Novacek and Charles Haley.
"What some people don't recognize," he said, "is that we're one of the best at operating the system. We took a hit this year, but next year we'll be at or near the top." Jones wheeled about in his chair and called across the room to his eldest son, Stephen, who was finishing his meal. Stephen is the club's salary-cap expert. "Where will we be next year, cap-wise?" Stephen calculated that under an expanded cap of probably $71 million, the Cowboys would owe between $5 million and $10 million in dead money. "We'll be second in the league," he told Jerry.
I'd saved the hard one for last, and now I let him have it. "Since you dictate every detail in this organization, are you willing to accept blame for the team's steady decline?"
The smile again, only slower, steadier, the smile of a man who has waited hours for this moment. "Are you giving me credit for three Super Bowls? Are you giving me credit for having the best team of the nineties with three different coaches? What you are seeing now are the constants in the system: guys on top losing players to free agency, drafting low, paying big salaries to keep star players. I know that we are exactly where we need to be, biting the bullet for a year, but I want our fans to know that too—to know that I know what I'm doing. So I'll accept responsibility if it's articulated where we are."
Jones followed me out of the room and to the elevator, smiling all the way. Me! me! me! was echoing in my aching brain. The interview had been a roaring success from his point of view; despite the glut of me's!, he couldn't have been more gracious or forthcoming. He had ruined my day. I had arrived full of animosity and feelings of betrayal, ready to come after him with Old Testament ferocity, but he had disarmed me with kindness and patience. How could I rip him after this?
Watching Quincy Carter stumble about that night in the Super Dome, so dazed, so confused, so very far from home, I began to gather my wits and recover my trademark subjectivity. When the devil visits in the dead of night, or so I've been told, he doesn't wear a red suit with a pointed tail and smell like Tabasco sauce. No, he comes with soft words and a goofy grin, the better to suck out your soul.
The most disheartening aspect of the way Jones runs his team is the way he treats his coaches. He controls them as if they were puppets. They parrot the party line, then watch in dismay as he undercuts them on a whim. As losses mounted last year, the staff practically imploded, nervous assistants pointing fingers at other assistants and bad-mouthing them to players. The situation got so bad that the assistants were sent to an off-season seminar with sports psychologists. Now they're once again on the spot. It's ridiculous to believe that a team that struggled to win five games last year can double that number. The Cowboys lost key veterans, they signed no free agents, and their off-the-rack draft choices are, to put it kindly, suspect. Jones carries on about the talent and the enthusiasm of the young players that he drafted, but we have only his word that this is true. We've heard this song before, particularly in the four years after Jimmy was canned. Jones gushed over top draft choices like Shante Carver, Sherman Williams, and Kavika Pittman—all distant memories. Of the 34 players selected by the Cowboys between 1994 and 1997 (people who should form the nucleus of the 2001 team), only guard Larry Allen and linebacker Dexter Coakley are still on the roster.
The financial crunch is one reason Jones has appeared so schizophrenic this season, bouncing from one wild scheme to another. He rushed Carter along because he needed to cover his investment. He wasn't concerned about the reaction of the media or the fans, and he especially didn't care what his coaches thought. He made the decision to cut Banks without bothering to consult with Wade Wilson, the quarterback coach, or Reilly, the offensive coordinator, who was left with the task of rethinking overnight an offense that had been months in preparation.
I'm not completely sure that Jones even bothered to consult head coach Dave Campo. Always the loyalist, Campo assured the media that cutting Banks was an "organizational decision." But if Campo suspected the change was coming, he kept his poker face just a few days earlier when he told me, "I can tell you right now that Tony Banks is our starting quarterback, based on his abilities and experience." Campo came here with Jimmy Johnson in 1989 and developed into one of the best defensive coaches in the league. The only reason his predecessor, Chan Gailey, had a winning record of 18-14 was that Campo's imaginative defense kept the Cowboys respectable. The 54-year-old is just damn glad to be here. He's a good and decent man, and he understands the tentative nature of working for Jerry Jones. "I wake up every morning thinking I've got the best job in the world," he told me one day in the team cafeteria. "If the time comes when they don't want me, I'll hug Jerry and thank him for the chance he gave me."
In 1994, after Jones fired Johnson, I wrote a story in this magazine supporting Jones, observing that only in a sport as narcissistic as pro football could a man be criticized for meddling with his own property. I take it back. I've come to understand that institutions have a life of their own, separate and apart from the person who might temporarily hold the deed. In the beginning the Cowboys were little more than a rich man's hobby for Clint Murchison, but as the team grew in stature, he understood that he was only a caretaker. Murchison was a quiet man with an ironic smile, a first-rate brain, and a dark sense of humor. He left all the organizational decisions to Schramm and all the football decisions to Landry. As far as I know, he never even attended a league meeting, much less a team meeting. He was too busy being a captain of industry. Jerry Jones is a joke around the NFL, a laughingstock, but Murchison would have enjoyed him as a punch line. Enjoyed and then dismissed him.
Jones does not have the humility to be a caretaker. Or, apparently, the stability. I didn't realize it back in 1994, but Jones is haunted almost to the point of neurosis by Jimmy Johnson's ghost. Haunted men act out of desperation, and Jones is desperate to prove one thing: that he can win without Johnson. A man this bullheaded, this self-righteous and self-assured, will destroy the team if that's what it takes. After all, in his view, this is his property.
I believe Jones when he says that he knows where he is and what he's doing. That doesn't mean he's smart or right, only that he's obstinate. He's hardly the only bull in the china shop of professional sports, but he may be the only one not handicapped by introspection or programmed to duck when the bricks start flying. Compared with George Steinbrenner, Jones is a puppy chewing up the furniture. Steinbrenner has the diabolical complexity of a Dickens experiment run amok, a Scrooge, a Heep, and a Micawber rolled into one. His Yankees may win ugly, but they win big and often. Al Davis is the most hated owner in the NFL, moving the Raiders up and down the coast of California like a band of Hell's Angels, but nobody snickers behind his back.
When Jones cut Tony Banks, he spoke of his need to "burn the bridges." In his delusions he imagines that starting over is easy. Keep your head down and don't look back. He must sense that Cowboys fans are restless, that they are losing patience, that to gain and keep their allegiance, the Cowboys have to do more than show up. In that respect, the big shakeup was probably his only move. It bought him time. The team would have gone nowhere with Banks. Carter? He's an unknown, a prospect, a hope, however remote. "Also, if Quincy doesn't pan out, we will have had a year to evaluate, with an eye on the 2002 draft," Jones told me in the dining room at the Hyatt, flicking that shopworn smile.
And if that doesn't work out, there's always the year after, right? Don't think so, Jerry. A lot of us are jumping off this train wreck.
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