Cote: Cowboys owner Jerry Jones still chasing glory -- and attention

Miami Herald

a day ago

The Dallas Cowboys' best player, defensive end Micah Parsons, is upset to the point of asking for a trade, and this seems just fine with Jerry Jones, the NFL's and all of professional sports' most famous and in some eays infamous team owner.
'I'm not losing any sleep over it,' said Jones of Parsons' dissatisfaction.
We have seen this before. Saw it with Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb. Heck, saw it what Emmitt Smith in 1993. Unrest over contract matters, Jones playing hardball, absorbing the attention that is as necessary to him as oxygen, then ultimately paying up. Expect that again.
Few think Parsons actually will be traded. It's just Jerry being Jerry. Then again, what a windfall Dallas would get in return. The controversy, the specualtion, it's all good to Mr. Jones.
'Never fails dawg,' as Lamb tweeted after Parsons made his trade request public. 'Just pay the man what you owe [him]. No need for the extra curricular.'
Said Prescott: 'He deserves to get paid. I think he should get paid, and, ultimately, going off the history of what I've seen, he will get paid. Hopefully, it's sooner than later.'
Jones is seen as a smart businessman, but erred in not extending Parsons' contract a year ago when the player first wanted that. Since then, the pricetage has ballooned. Since then, Parsons made his fourth straight Pro Bowl as his four-year sack total rose to 52 1/2. Since then, comparable talents Maxx Crosby, Myles Garrett and T.J. Watt all received new contracts elsewhere that re-set the market to a point Parsons should now command a position-record deal worth well over $40 million per year.
Guess Jones is not losing any sleep over that, either.
Jones is cantankerous but to me still oddly entertaining at 82, a man forever fascinating to the media because he is always out front chasing headlines, but frustrating to fans because he has not chased championships nearly as effectively for decades now.
Jones, also his team's general manager, is hands-on like no other owner, always a hovering sideline presence. In March he met 'informally' with Parsons, 1-on-1, but it turend into what seemed like a negotiation for a new contract that left Jones thinking --erroneously -- a new deal had been agreed upon. Parsons had other thoughts, as his agent was not involved in those talks, a seeming violation of NFLPA protocols.
Again, no sleep lost.
The erosion of Jones' legacy is happening gradually, like that of a rock formation, too slowly to see in real time but apparent across generations. In lockstep with the owner's diminishment, 'America's Team' as the Dallas Cowboys nickname has become archaic and taken on almost a mocking quality.
The Jones Boys last won a Super Bowl 30 years ago, in '95. They have not come close, not advanced past the playoff's divisional round, since, despite a lineage of well above-average quarterbacking from the last of Troy Aikman to Tony Romo and now Prescott.
It would be harsh and wrong to call Jones a failed owner. Not with three Super Bowl rings on his resume', and a decent 13 playoff appearances in the 29 years since the last title.
Sports has know too many notorious, genuinely failed owners across history to count Jones among them. That dubious list may have started with Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, forever the man who traded away Babe Ruth. In Washington until recently, Dan Snyder as an NFL owner of repugnant reputation.
Jerry Reinsdorf, Mike Brown, James Dolan, Jeffrey Loria in Miami, Donald Sterling and yes, Michael Jordan -- those and more names arise when the topic of controversial or lousy owners comes up.
But if Jones is not by any means a failed owner it would be fair to call him a fading owner, one fighting time and his own standard of ever-more-distant success to be relevant again, relevant once more. Reputation battered but ego intact, Jones still preens as an NFL titan, though the game seems to have passed him by. Surely the rival and reigning champion Philadelphia Eagles have in the NFC East, with Washington fast-rising as the Cowboys try to rebound from a 7-10 season.
South Florida's major pro-team owners — the Dolphins' Stephen Ross, Heat's Micky Arison, Marlins' Bruce Sherman, Panthers' Vincent Viola and Inter Miami's Jorge Mas — are benign by comparison. Who isn't? Those five have had varying places on the success to failure scale, but none is close to the outspoken, attention-magnet lighting rod the Cowboys' man out front is.
Jones, of course, owns a special, notorious place all his own in South Florida sports history. It is how he introduced himself to the world, to Dallas and the NFL ... and to Miami.
In early 1989 Jones was a wealthy but little known 46-year-old Arkansas oil and gas billionaire. Soon, everybdy would know his name. He bought the famed Dallas Cowboys, quickly fired legendary coach Tom Landry, and hired his friend and former Arkansas Razorbacks teammate Jimmy Johnson away from the Miami Hurricanes.
It was a stunning, beyond-blockbuster sequence that quaked pro and college football — and Miami — and set the tone for an NFL career chasing championship and the national spotlight, not necessarily in that order.
For Dallas it was not love at first sight. Many Cowboys fans initialy were shocked and bruised by the firing of the legendary Landry, then Johnson went 1-15 that first season. But Johnson's back-to-back Super Bowl wins in 1992 and '93 made Jones seem a genius, before a falling out led Johnson to briefly retire before resurfacing as Dolphins coach. When Dallas won a third Super Bowl in '95 with Barry Switzer inheriting most of Johnson's guys, it made Jones further beloved in Dallas.
It has been the 30 years since that gradually have seen the owner's legacy not age especially well.
No worry, though. Jerry Jones won't lose any sleep over it as long as the power is his and the attention keeps coming.