When studying bewildering decisions that Jerry Jones makes — like deciding to keep the consistent playoff dry heave Mike McCarthy, the guy who could only get to one Super Bowl with Aaron Rodgers — it’s important to remember how he and the Cowboys got here. It was a long time ago now and a lot of NFL fans might not have even been born yet.
It was all the way back in 1994, and Dallas was coming off their second straight Super Bowl win. They were, perhaps for the only time in reality, actually America’s team. They were brash, they were loud, they were on more drugs than the entire continent of South America could produce, Charles Haley was cranking his hog on the reg in the locker room, it was a wild time. They were basically everything everyone loves, and a lot of what it doesn’t love, about the NFL distilled into one team.
And then at the owners’ meetings, Jerry Jones got drunk, badmouthed Jimmy Johnson to any media member within earshot, got into a boozy argument with Johnson himself, and basically fired him on the spot because Jones felt that he wasn’t getting enough credit for the Cowboys success as Johnson was. He wanted it all for himself. Johnson was the architect of one of the best college teams of all time at Miami and then orchestrated the Herschel Walker trade that propelled the Cowboys into the dynasty they became. He is one of football’s greatest coaches. Jones was just some loudmouth oil baron who happened to buy the Cowboys and then canned Tom Landry, as far as anyone was concerned at the time.
Oh, sure, the Cowboys would win a third Super Bowl under Barry Switzer, but they did it with Johnson’s roster. Ever since Jones has taken the helm and gotten his fingers into the roster, the Cowboys haven’t even seen an NFC Championship game, much less another Super Bowl. This is what Jerruh wanted, this is what he started after one too many at an owners’ meeting and mixed business with bourbon. The Cowboys’ now near three-decade haplessness is rooted in a gassed-up Jones yelling at the media that anyone could have done Johnson’s job. Well, someone has, and has proven that not everyone could, and it’s Jones.
Ever since, Jones has only wanted coaches that let him be the Cowboys. Coaches that won’t get in the way. Coaches that need the job more than the Cowboys need them. Coaches that will let Jones have his own postgame presser and pretend he’s George Halas or whatever. Coaches that don’t have the gas to put him back in his place or to point out that he’s basically run the team into the ground more often than not.
Oh, he tried the Bill Parcells thing. It was Parcells’s last job and something of a last hurrah after the whole Jets thing went balls-up and his protege Bill Belichick had passed him by. But given that it was one last roll of the dice, Parcells was still beholden to Jones. He wasn’t going anywhere else to coach.
Ever since then, it’s been stooge after stooge, who just had to watch helplessly while Jones was doing things like diagnosing his quarterback’s injuries himself and sending whatever dizzy individual back out there to sacrifice a few more years off his life. Chan Gailey or Jason Garrett, or now McCarthy, they’re all the same dimwit who’s just happy to get the check.
They all play a role. They all cock it up in some way or another and allow Jones to stumble down from his box and do his fire and brimstone thing with the press to make it look like he has all the answers and it’s nothing to do with him, and then the whole cycle starts over again with some other goofus wearing the baseball cap and headset who will eventually be engulfed by Jones’s flames.
Belichick was never going to put up with that kind of thing. No coach who has earned the right to assert their territory would, to take a step back and just eat Jones’s sh*t all the time. So, of course, McCarthy is back, he doesn’t have much else to do.
But remember, it all gets back to one bender 30 years ago. Kids, some things you do at 2 a.m. do last a lifetime and they’re not all detected through a cotton swab.
Follow Sam on Twitter @Felsgate or on Bluesky @Felsgate.bsky.social
