I grew up watching Tom Landry’s Dallas Cowboys. Roger Staubach would hand the ball off to Tony Dorset or throw it to Billy Joe Dupree or Drew Pearson and the game would often come down to the finial two minutes. I’m sure the Dallas Cowboys had an owner in those glory days of yore, but I never heard of him and couldn’t tell you who it was today without googling it. The Owner didn’t matter. Need I say those were the good old days?
Current Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has been hated by Dallas Cowboys fans since day one, with a tiny window of begrudged respect for his common sense of getting the hell out of the way while Jimmy Johnson took the team from 1-15 to winning two Super Bowls. As soon as Jerry Jones fired Jimmy Johnson and proclaimed any one of 500 coaches could take HIS team to the Superbowl, we went right back to hating him. But Jerry Jones has never given a good goddamn what the fans think of him, the Dallas Cowboys are still HIS team and he is still of the opinion that only he can fix what is wrong with it.
Jerry Jones said that he would be watching all the Playoff Games closely and I hope that he paid attention when he did. The NFL is changing, but Jerry Jones isn’t. The New England Patriots are a textbook perfect football team who did everything an old school football team should do. They aren’t going to be in the Super Bowl this year. Like Payton Manning, the other living legend who will be watching the Super Bowl from home, Tom Brady threw one too many interceptions and wasn’t able to score the needed points in the closing minutes. Does this sound familiar Jerry?
I’m sure t0 Jerry is does, but the message Jerry Jones will take home is not that his football team is using the wrong blueprint. No, Jerry Jones will nod to himself and say-See? My Team is just as good as the Denver Broncos and the New England Patriots! We were just a few plays away from being in the Super Bowl! Because that’s the world that Jerry Jones lives in.
I watched a few of the Playoff games and I have to say that I was amazed by the caliber of play. Oh there were a few missed tackles here and there and a few dropped passes, but being a Dallas Cowboys fan I have forgotten what it’s like to watch two great teams battle it out. This was exciting instead of depressing.
Jerry Jones has made a number of changes during this off-season, just as he makes a number of changes every off-season. His Dallas Cowboys aren’t as good as they should be, so someone has to be to blame. Jerry Jones has fired a lot of coaches and hired a lot of coaches. But the three people that need to be replaced-Jerry Jones, Jason Garret, and Tony Romo-are all safe in their jobs.
In the end, it’s the players on the field that win or lose the games-but it’s GM Jerry Jones that put those players on the field. More than any other NFL owner, Jerry Jones wants all the credit, so he gets all the blame as well. Unless he lucks out and drafts this year’s Troy Aikman or Emmit Smith-but the odds are more along the lines of his drafting this year’s Doug Free or Bobby Carpenter-the Dallas Cowboys will remain much the same.
Back in the glory days of 1993 a reporter asked Daryl “Moose” Johnston if he thought his team would make it back to the Super Bowl the following year. Daryl answered by saying that he didn’t know, because this Dallas Cowboys team wasn’t even the same as the Dallas Cowboys team that had won the Super Bowl the year before. This was news to me, as the Big Names all remained the same for those five or six years of greatness. But Daryl was right, teams change, even great teams.
The current Dallas Cowboys are not a great team, and the changes that are made are not likely to make too much difference. After all, Jerry Jones still thinks his team is only three or four plays away from winning the Super Bowl-so why would he want to screw that up?
