Texas Monthly Talks
Jerry Jones
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I’m conforming more. Given that I’ve been in it as long as I have, I should know more and know better. They don’t give out how-to books when you come into the NFL to run a team. In the early years, with so many of the things that I was a proponent of, I didn’t have the time to have a bad time. I went ahead and instituted them, and that created push-back from the other owners, because by its nature the league is a socialized organization. Well, I’m states’ rights. What I wanted for the Dallas Cowboys, having to do with our ability to maximize revenues, didn’t align with what the league wanted, but I entered the NFL from a different vantage point. I paid more for the Cowboys in 1989 than anybody had ever paid for anything in sports prior to that time. So I was listening to different music than someone who had made the investment in his team twenty or thirty years earlier. Not only was I aggressive, I was quickly aggressive, because the meter was ticking.
That must have gone over well.
I don’t like confrontation, although it’s alleged that I do. But I learned playing football that confrontation is necessary. You’d better get another sport if you don’t acknowledge and accept and willfully go after confrontation.
The result is that people see you as somebody who shoots first and asks questions later.
I would refute completely the idea that I don’t contemplate and think and take advice. That’s not how I make decisions. I’ve been self-employed all my life, and one thing you learn real quickly is that you can’t blame anybody else. It’s the guy in the mirror that you gotta straighten out before you take your first step. You need to do it way before the crisis hits, rather than wringing your hands on the side of the bed after it’s on you. And if you’re not in new and unusual territory, you’re not out in front enough to make it work. That’s my method. It works well in the NFL.
Tell me about your earliest success.
We were so fortunate to come into the league, have the number one pick, and have Troy Aikman be there.
It makes things a lot easier when that’s the start.
We were also so fortunate that we had a player like Herschel Walker, who commanded three years’ worth of another team’s draft picks. Those picks are currency in the NFL. And so during the first three and four years that I was involved with the Cowboys, we had five times the amount of currency in draft-pick value that we’ve ever had since. It’s like going to Las Vegas. If you’ve got money in your pocket, you can be a better gambler. But when that money has to take care of home, you can’t be the gambler. We were able to be gamblers because of those early trades. They helped us have winning teams.
Not just winning teams but three Super Bowl wins in the earliest years that you owned the Cowboys.
I recognize today that staying in the traditional model doesn’t get you to the Super Bowl. You’ve got to take some risks. Over the years, talented players have been key. Yet we’re in a system in which the more you win, the less shot you have at those talented players, because winning teams get to pick last. So you have to be a master of the talent pool. Here’s where I get a lot of criticism: When you’re at a disadvantage, you’ve got to do some unorthodox things to even it out. Sometimes you work in a rehab-type situation with a player. And you get the consequences—usually you don’t have success more often than you do. But because nobody can fire me, I can take those risks, whereas other personnel managers around the nation get sent home.
Why aren’t more owners general managers?
More and more are active in those areas. Look, as owners, we know that it takes talent to win a Super Bowl. But our job is also to set expectations for our players—that’s the biggest thing we can do. I can’t set a bigger expectation than building a stadium like this. [My players] know I’ve got it all shoved out here, so they need to do their part. If they’re getting paid extraordinarily, they need to be doing extraordinarily well at their job. We owners need people we can count on. Sometimes some of the most dependable people are ones who had some tough times and had some down times and have gotten back up on their feet.
Give me an example.
Michael Irvin.
Despite all of his problems over the years, your relationship with him is strong.
Yes, it is. He was a young man then, and he’s a man now. I have all the feelings I ought to have for an individual I respect. He’s my friend, my son. I’m his mentor. At the end of the day, if he had been a dentist and I had gotten to know him, I would have had the same feelings about him.
Does Michael Vick seem like such a person? Is Vick someone you looked at and said, “He might be salvageable”?
I don’t know him.
You didn’t look seriously at signing him as a Cowboy?
I did not, because of where we are with our position players.
Was Terrell Owens an example of someone you took a chance on but who didn’t work out the way that you wanted?
I had a good feeling about Terrell. We had a really great relationship. It’s unfortunate that it ended. It was portrayed as a chemistry thing, but the facts are that when you’re in my position, you have to make decisions about salary, about age. You have to make decisions about players who can stop the progress of other players. You can’t have it all.
Honestly assess the 2009 team. Is it great? Pretty good? Cowboys fans understandably want to know if you’re going to make the Super Bowl, unlike last year.
We’ve got talent in the positions that count: playmaking, quarterbacking, pressure play on defense, coverage on defense. We cannot dismiss the role of injury in our season last year. This year we have a healthy team, and we should be able to play at a level where the expectations were for us then. That’s a big statement, because we were considered by many people to be Super Bowl contenders. People are frustrated that it didn’t happen. But the fact is, the Cowboys are one of the few teams that have a winning record for the last three years.
If that’s the case, why is there the perception that the Cowboys haven’t been playing anything close to their best?
Because we haven’t been to a playoff game. There’s a double handful of teams in the NFL that have never won a Super Bowl. So I do feel good about our team. We’ve got a team that could represent us well in this new season.
This is a big anniversary year for you: forty-five years since you played on Arkansas’ national championship team. Do you ever think to yourself, “This could have gone differently—I could have ended up playing for a team instead of owning one”?
Now that I’ve gotten to have as much involvement in sports as I’ve had, I don’t revisit the course I pursued. I do know this: College was where I got the passion for wanting to be involved in pro sports, with the Cowboys. All us kids were about the same. We all had our parents send us a little money from home. I was married when I was a junior to Gene, who I’m still married to. Sixteen of us who played on that national championship team were married. It was quite an experience. But so is my time with the Cowboys. I say this quite a bit, and I mean it: I own businesses and I own real estate—things like that—so I know what it means to own something, but I don’t, for one minute, think I own the Dallas Cowboys. You can’t own the Cowboys. You can’t own the University of Texas. The fans, the people who are passionate from generation to generation, are the real owners. My role is to carry the ball while I can.
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