Jones has faced more questions in recent years about continuing to serve as the General Manager for the Cowboys. Photo courtesy of AP, taken by Mark Terrill.
On Aug. 19, Netflix released “America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys.” Despite being a documentary about “his Cowboys,” it only focuses on Jerry Jones’ football team during their dynastic success in the early to mid-90s.
For those unfamiliar with the Cowboys and why the documentary only focuses on that stretch of time, it's because they haven’t had any major wins in 29 years.
Sorry Cowboys fans, but a 12-win season doesn’t mean anything when every team in your division has played in or won an NFC championship game or Super Bowl more recently than you.
This continued cycle of being talented enough to make the playoffs but not win anything major is, in large part, due to Jerry Jones’ gambling habit.
Early in his career, Jones gambled by buying the Cowboys, he gambled by trading Herschel Walker in his prime and firing head coach Tom Landry in favor of Jimmy Johnson. These gambles all paid off big time, so naturally, he continued to ride the hot hand.
Nine days after the documentary was released, Jones traded Micah Parsons — one of the best defensive players in the league — for draft picks.
In similar fashion to the trade that catapulted the Cowboys into success, Jones has bet his team on successfully hitting draft selections instead of retaining one of the best players in the league.
At the time of writing, the Cowboys are 1-1 and don’t look to be contenders. In particular, their defense has struggled both in stopping the run and the pass, despite Jones’ assertions that the defense would improve following the trade.
Meanwhile, Parsons has propelled the Green Bay Packers into talks of winning the Super Bowl after a dominant 2-0 start to the season. The sudden leap forward in the Packers' defense since acquiring Parsons is largely why the team is currently viewed as one of the best in the league.
Fun fact: The team the Cowboys most recently lost to in the playoffs was the Green Bay Packers, a game in which the No. 2 seed Cowboys were heavily favored over the No. 7 seed Packers.
These last 29 —and likely soon to be 30 — seasons of misery for Cowboys fans make any sane person wonder how Jones hasn’t had the team wrestled away from him Bolshevik Revolution-style.
After all, if the definition of “failure” for a team owner comes purely from a team winning on the field, then Jones has certainly failed. Others define failure by how excited fans are to watch their team every year, and how successful the team has been in general.
If you want to meet fans who are excited, Cowboys fans are that and more. Even when they’re horrifically losing in the playoffs, Cowboys fans say every year is the year their team will win it all. They show up loud and proud every week to either see their team win in an exciting way or get blown out in spectacular fashion.
Digging a bit deeper, many fans are enamored by the possibility that this season will finally be the one where they win another Super Bowl. While many of Jones’ trades and draft picks haven’t brought the team success, all it takes is him stringing a couple together for the Cowboys to get back to winning again.
Seeing as Jones is both the owner of the team and the general manager, personnel decisions don’t have to be carefully made to appease team ownership. He can make whatever team decisions he wants to make.
This ties to a pillar of Jones’ ownership highlighted in the documentary — anything the Cowboys do, it has to be entertaining.
He wanted to ensure the lackadaisical games and stoic atmosphere surrounding the team in the late 80s was pushed out of everyone’s mind by a brash and thrilling on-field product week in and week out.
For the Cowboys, the end of their season doesn’t mean the end of the entertainment. Every offseason they make some absurd trade or have a major contract dispute, keeping the team in the headlines through the summer.
By the time the regular season begins again, fan delusions are at an all-time high — even if the Cowboys have another lackluster year, they’ll at least make it entertaining to watch.
It’s no wonder that the Cowboys are the most valuable sports franchise in the world, worth an estimated $10.1 billion. The team is always entertaining — in winning and in losing — and its fans won’t stop rooting for it as they try to win the Super Bowl again.
From a winning standpoint, Jerry Jones has failed the Cowboys. Considering the state the team was in, however, when he bought it and how successful they are now in certain aspects, it’s hard to argue that Jones’ time as team owner has been a complete failure.
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