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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Some of Johnson's act was smoke and mirrors, but he had luck and timing. He had talent too, a rare combination of Schramm's gift for legerdemain and Landry's genius for strategy. All Jones had was a big mouth, a bigger ego, and a bulging wallet that included $140 million he acquired from a sweetheart natural gas deal in Arkansas. The media loved Johnson and made fun of Jones, frequently with Johnson's encouragement. Johnson dropped hints that his boss was a lightweight, a whiner, a hillbilly buffoon whose only talent was carrying the checkbook. After the 1990 season, Jones is said to have whined to his coach: "I want it to be Jerry and Jimmy . . . not just Jimmy."
But Jimmy let it be known that he, not Jerry, made all the football decisions. Johnson's assistant coaches leaked funny asides to the media, designed to demean and embarrass Jones. During the 1992 draft, for example, Jones is said to have directed Johnson to pretend to be consulting with him any time the cameras turned their way. More enthusiastic than articulate, Jones stumbled through interviews, often leaving the impression that he was thinking of coaching the team himself. Nobody took him seriously, of course. Everyone understood that Johnson was the alpha of the Cowboys' equation, the bedrock on which championship seasons were built. Losing face, Jones also lost his sense of humor. Firing Johnson was the ultimate act of petulance, but Jones got what he wanted. After that nobody ever doubted who was the boss of the Dallas Cowboys.
I have always loved training camp. The summer ritual that precedes a season symbolizes a new beginning, new challenges, a renewal of faith. It is living hell for the players but great fun for the sportswriters. Driving from Dallas' Love Field to training camp in Wichita Falls this summer, I was surprised to feel not the customary elation or anticipation but a curious heaviness and despair. That's when I knew my love affair with the Cowboys was over. It had ended with a whimper rather than a bang.It wasn't just the procession of losing seasons. I'd lived through those before. I expected them, factored them into the equation. No, this was something else, something like a death in the family. The heartlessness, hopelessness, and haplessness of this present situation seemed permanent, irreconcilable. The Cowboys had lost their focus, their core, their substance, their relevancy. Even more surprising, I realized that I didn't care, and I wasn't sure anyone else did either.
My mission was to seek out Jerry Jones and demand to know why. As things developed, nailing him down was easier said than done. On my third day at camp, I was finally able to schedule a one-on-one with Jones. Cowboys publicity director Rich Dalrymple arranged the interview in the team dining room, and I would see Jones after he finished meeting with the scouts. I waited a full hour, but he never showed. I assumed that he wasn't ignoring me, that he was preoccupied with the job of running the Cowboys.
Indeed, he was everywhere and nowhere, all over the place like a blob of mercury, impossible to pin down. You saw him striding across the practice field at Midwestern State University, cell phone at the ready, so full of himself he squeaked. You saw him on television, hurrying to or from meetings with the coaches, briefing reporters, using the pronouns "I" and "we" interchangeably to describe his team. You heard him making ridiculous assertions such as his prediction that the 2001 Cowboys could win ten games. Jones had so many irons in the fire I couldn't keep up with them and doubted that he could either. Jones's draft choices. Jones's free agents. Jones's trades. Jones's proposal for a $1 billion entertainment center and 100,000-seat retractable-dome stadium that he expected some dim-witted suburb to build. Jones's arena football team. Jones's bid to slap the Cowboys' logo on a NASCAR entry. This wasn't a football team anymore; it was a marketing ploy.
One afternoon during practice there was the clash of large wet bodies, offense meeting defense, and as the coaches sorted through the pile, one player remained on the ground. Like a shot, Jones made himself the center of the action. The injured player was a rookie lineman, Jason Gamble. A few minutes later Jones wandered over to where I was standing and whispered knowingly, "Fractured tibia." Fortunately, it turned out to be nothing worse than a sprained ankle, magnified by Jones's need to appear omniscient. But there it was, that creepy smile. It seemed unnaturally tight, like it was taken off one of those boutique corpses on Six Feet Under, and it was so bright it made my teeth hurt. There were rumors of a face lift in the off-season to accessorize his 55-pound weight loss. For once Jones wasn't talking, but his coyness only tantalized the media, causing some to speculate that the makeover symbolized a metaphorical rebirth for this football team. In Jones's mind, it did. His prediction of ten wins was both a rallying cry and a warning to his coaches. This is a football team that Jerry Jones put together, and if he says they're good enough to win ten games, then, by God, that's how many he expects. Otherwise, heads will roll.
I finally got to sit down with Jones a few hours before the third preseason game, in a banquet room at the New Orleans Hyatt Regency where the players were finishing their pre-game meal. I had forgotten that he can be as charming as he is bombastic and impetuous. But I was about to be reminded.
It had been quite a week for Jones and for the Cowboys. The previous Saturday they had been battered by the Denver Broncos in front of a demoralized Texas Stadium. Though the official attendance was 37,127, some estimated a crowd as small as 20,000. Jones had hinted in a radio interview at halftime that he might shake things up. Three days later he delivered, stunning everyone in the organization by cutting Tony Banks, the journeyman quarterback signed for minimum wages as a transitional figure to replace the retired Aikman. At the same time, Jones announced that the new starter was Quincy Carter, a rookie drafted in the second round.
Talk about your jaw-dropper; this move was almost in the "Good-bye, Jimmy" category. With a couple of brief exceptions, the Cowboys' quarterback position had been in capable hands for forty years. Now it was being handed over to the rawest of untested rookies. Since Jones had traded the team's first-round picks in both 2000 and 2001 to the Seattle Seahawks for receiver Joey Galloway, the second-round pick this past April took on added significance. It represented, at least symbolically, the Cowboys' future. Against the advice of most experts, Jones selected Carter, even though he had left the University of Georgia a year early after a poor, injury-marred junior season. Quarterback prospects are always risky in the NFL, especially those grabbed near the top of the draft. For every Aikman or Peyton Manning, there are three Cade McNowns. But the bomb rate for those who don't play their senior year is staggering: Andre Ware, Heath Shuler, Tommy Maddox, and Ryan Leaf (whom, inexplicably, the Cowboys wanted to sign until he failed a physical) are among the many underclassmen who sank in a sea of premature expectations. But Jones knows that the trend today is big, mobile passers like Daunte Culpepper of the Vikings and Donovan McNabb of the Philadelphia Eagles. Quincy Carter, who is six two and 232 pounds, is cast in that mold.
The most disturbing thing about the shake-up was that in one spastic move, Jones had wrecked months of planning. The idea was to give Carter a year or two to learn the position while Banks, who had failed with two other franchises but at least had game experience, carried the load. To accommodate Banks' strong arm, offensive coordinator Jack Reilly had devised a system dependent on deep passes to the speedy wide receivers, Galloway and Raghib "Rocket" Ismail. Jones had said at the time of the draft: "Quincy needs to benefit from working and learning behind a veteran like Tony Banks. I think we [read: Jimmy Johnson] made a mistake rushing Troy Aikman his rookie year, and we all paid a price for that." Banks had disappointed Campo with his laid-back attitude, but all of the quarterback candidates had at times looked like frat boys tossing passes on the beach. Carter's wobbly throws earned him the nickname "the Duck Hunter." But Banks never had a chance. A few days after Jones cut him, he turned up on the Washington Redskins roster, looking forward, no doubt, to two games with the archrival Cowboys.
Seated at a back table in the hotel banquet room, Jones ate a steak while I fired questions, his smile amiable and relaxed. Why, I demanded, had he drafted an unproven talent like Carter with his top pick? And why, oh, why, after two preseason games, was Carter locked into the starter's job?
The smile tightened as Jones rambled on about "the system," how five- or ten-year plans were no longer possible in the NFL, how it was necessary to think and act fast, to play rookies, to stretch, to take risks. "I thought [drafting Carter] was the ideal situation to take a risk," he told me. "It was cap friendly. And he might turn out to be a top quarterback. You cannot get to the Super Bowl by playing it safe. You've got to get ahead of the system, otherwise you're doomed to stay in the middle of the pack."
"With Carter as your starter," I suggested, "you're more likely to be at the bottom than in the middle. Why the sudden reversal?"
The smile popped like a flashbulb, indicating that Jones was way ahead of me. "I thought it was time to liven things up," he said. "The minute I got the perspective that Banks was not our long-term quarterback, I wanted to make the change immediately."
I reminded Jones what he had said about rushing Aikman as a rookie.
"This isn't 1989," he told me. "This is a much more experienced team. Also, Quincy can move. He has a level of maturity, great confidence, a hunger to learn. I'd be surprised if he takes the pounding that Troy took as a rookie."
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