NOTE: This musing also appears today on our sister site Leblanguage. Please visit it daily for coverage of media, sports, politics and life.
First off, my most sincere gratitude for those of you who actually reached out to inquire why what you have expressed has become a daily fix was missing from your social media feed of choice last week. My internet connectivity issues were finally resolved, albeit not without some difficulties that continue to persist with some of my periphereal support devices. But at least we’re up and running enough for me to create and publish, leaving me to deal with my degree of technical ineptness elsewhere as I always seem to do–on my own.
And not a moment to so0n in some ways because I’ve been holding off on unloading on one Jerral Wayne Jones, Senior, who for the less sports-savvy just happens to be the owner of the highest-valued franchise of any major American professional league, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. According to THE BLEACHER REPORT’s Doric Sam in a piece from last week, per the even more credible Justin Teitelbaum and Brett Knight of Forbes the Cowboys currently have a valuation of $13 billion, a full $2.5 billion ahead of the NFL runner-up Los Angeles Rams. And Jones’ personal net worth is $16.6 billion.
So the fact that he chose to trade perhaps his highest upside player last week over what ultimately amounted to a disparity that at maximum would have totaled $26 million is at the very least alarming, certainly to Cowboys fans, who haven’t even seen a conference championship game, let alone a Super Bowl victory, in three decades. And indeed calls into questions behaviors that can likely only be explained in even more sinister terms. DALLAS COWBOYS ON SPORTS ILLUSTRATED’s Josh Sanchez reported the cold facts last week as they went down last week:
After a highly publicized contract dispute, the Dallas Cowboys decided to turn the page on the Micah Parsons era and shipped him off to the Green Bay Packers in a blockbuster trade that had the NFL world in a frenzy. In exchange for Parsons, the Cowboys received two first-round NFL draft picks and three-time Pro Bowl defensive tackle Kenny Clark.
Parsons…got the record-setting payday he had been seeking and is now the highest-paid non-quarterback in league history after inking his extension. Parsons and the Packers reached an agreement on a four-year, $180 million deal, with $120 million fully guaranteed at signing… still more than the $40.5 million annual average the Cowboys reportedly offered, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter.
In relative terms to my net worth, that gap amounts to less than a farthing.
And in light of recent hold-outs and hold-ins that ultimately resulted in Jones’ caving to other stars’ demands that rewarded the likes of quarterback Dak Prescott and star receiver Cee Dee Lamb being rewarded with nine-figure long-term deals, in the sports world this was seen as all the more unexpected.
Not to me, if one takes a look back at the degree of ego that was involved in this standoff. Unlike his now-former teammates, Parsons has a highly popular podcast with BLEACHER REPORT where he has frequently been critical of management, and occasionally even threw shade at the likes of the oft-injured Prescott. It didn’t exactly help his street cred around Arlington. And especially from a defensive player.
Jones has a football history, albeit one that dates back to the 1960s as an offensive lineman with the University of Arkansas and lifelong friendships with offenisve gurus like his ex-teammate Jimmy Johnson, who as coach led the Cowboys to back-to-back world championships in the early 1990s. But Jones’ ego ultimately led to an acrimonious divorce that metacicized into a three-decade freeze-out that was only resolved at the end of 2023 when Jones finally consented to allow Johnson to be installed in the Cowboys’ prestigious Ring of Honor–three years after the NFL Hall of Fame inducted him.
So one should consider Jones thin-skinned and overly sensitive regardless of knowing anything else about him. But when one digs a tad deeper, one discovers some even more disturbing qualities–some that date back even before the Cowboys’ franchise was created.
In late 2022 MSNBC’s Jahan Jones reported this finding:
The Washington Post published a photo last week of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones standing with a racist mob when he was a teenager in Arkansas in 1957. As the Post reported:
On the first day of classes at North Little Rock High, a crew-cut sophomore named Jerral Wayne Jones found his spot among a phalanx of White boys who stood at the front entrance and blocked the path of six Black students attempting to desegregate the school.
Jones told the Post he only showed up that day to observe what was going on (he made the same claim to ESPN), but the Post explains why that seems implausible:
[The] photographs indicate Jones had to scurry around the North Little Rock Six to reach the top of the stairs before the Black students completed their walk up to the schoolhouse door. And while Jones offered a common explanation of the confrontation — that it was the work of older white supremacists — most of those surrounding the six young Black men were teenagers.
And it’s a pattern that has continued well into more recent times. Here’s CBS SPORTS’ John Breech in November 2017:
A video of the Cowboys owner was released on Friday that showed Jones making a racially insensitive remark while being filmed on a phone camera at a hotel in 2013. On the video, which was released by theblast.com, Jones is asked to send a special message to woman named Jennifer who either just got engaged or married.
“Jennifer, congratulations on the wedding. Now, you know he’s with a black girl tonight, don’t you?” Jones says, as he let out a big laugh.
And last September NJ.com’s Todderick Hunt contributed this to the growing dumpster fire:
Several years ago during a practice held in Southern California, Jones was caught “complementing” a player and his “balance” in this newly-surfaced clip. “He showed good balance right there. That was pretty good right there. He showed balance,” Jones said after the runner “stayed up” on his feet. “Five-nine and a half, 210 (pounds). Four-four-one (40-yard dash). Nine and three-inch hands. Eight and a half inch d—k.”
So with a track record like that it’s hard for me to take the kind of explanation for the Parsons trade that Sanchez reported yesterday as anything more than disingenous:
When Jones met with the media to explain his reason for shipping Parsons to the NFC North, he threw some shade at the All-Pro pass rusher and said the goal was for the Cowboys defense to improve against the run. By getting a true nose tackle like Kenny Clark, Jones believes the team did just that. On Saturday, with a few days to process the move, Jones was back speaking to the media and doubled down on his comments that trading Parsons helps improve the defense. “Our player that we got is outstanding. We knew that, and he’ll immediately start making plays for us here when we get up there against those Philadelphia Eagles. But the most important thing is we really wanted to stop the run,” Jones said on the NFL Network, per Tommy Yarrish of DallasCowboys.com.
Jones has even gone out of his way to compare this trade to the one he engineered shortly after he took over the team in 1989 that resulted in then-star running back Herschel Walker being jettisoned to Minnesota. But that brought back a far greater haul, as BLEACHER REPORT’s Nick Allen recounted a while back:
In 1989, at the peak of Walker’s NFL career, the Cowboys sent Herschel Walker to the Vikings for five players and six draft picks. The players were LB Jesse Solomon, DB Is(a)ac Holt, RB Darrin Nelson, LB David Howard, and DE Alex Stewart. The picks turned into players such as Emmitt Smith, Russell Maryland, Kevin Smith, and Darren Woodson. Emmitt Smith is one of the greatest—if not the best—running backs in NFL history. He is the all-time leading rusher with 18,355 yards. His 175 total touchdowns rank him second all-time behind Jerry Rice (207). Darren Woodson was selected to five pro bowls, and was named all-pro four times. He is the Cowboys’ all-time leading tackler with 1,350 career tackles.
Mind you, that was a trade that was pulled off and the draft pick development sheparded by his then-buddy Johnson, who had won an NCAA title at the University of Miami when Jones bulldozed him into Dallas as the replacement for the legendary Tom Landry. While the jury may still be out of the eventual first run draft picks the Cowboys have received from Green Bay in the Parsons swap, they will likely be late first-rounders at best. And with the inexperienced nepocoach Brian Schottenheimer in charge–with nary a single game of head coaching experience at either the college or pro level–the odds appear quite remote for a recurrence to transpire.
I can’t help but conclude that Jones’ obstinance has been emboldened by the facts that he’s already looking ahead to the ratings potential of Thursday night’s season opener against the world champion Eagles and the return of Parsons to Dallas at the end of the month in prime time on NBC. And in a state governed by Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz the feelings of the younger end of a fan base that hasn’t known success in their lifetime matters not a whit to a billionaire roughly 80 who thinks he knows far more than anyone else about everything and will not hesitate to remind you of that–and his net worth are likely insignificant at best. We kinda know how a plurality of ‘Merica feels about folks like that these days.
And perhaps suggests that what’s really the reason that Micah Parsons is a Green Bay Packer is that Jones has applied a two-word description to him. The first of which being uppity.
Courage…