Jerry Jones is one month older than President Joe Biden. Unlike Biden, Jones has no plans to step aside anytime soon. In August, the 81-year-old was asked whether he was thinking of hiring anyone to help him run the team. “Hell no,” Jones told Clarence Hill of All Dallas. “There’s nobody that could fucking come in here and do all the contracts … and be a GM any better than I can.”
Jones doesn’t just say that to say that. He seems to firmly believe it. Yet Dallas has not made a conference championship game in nearly three decades. The Cowboys have had three consecutive playoff collapses, each more humiliating than the last. And this coming season has the potential to wind up even more chaotic.
Dallas was just steamrolled by CeeDee Lamb’s agents for a huge four-year, $136 million contract extension after a lengthy and public holdout. The team spent almost no money in free agency this offseason, and quarterback Dak Prescott will be free to leave the team next offseason if the Cowboys don’t get a deal done with him before then (he has no trade and no tag clauses in his existing contract). Yet Dallas’s biggest problem might not be Prescott leaving, or Lamb staying, or a looming need for a Micah Parsons extension. It’s getting the Joneses to keep up.
The Dallas Cowboys—ostensibly the most valuable sports franchise in the world at $10 billion—are operating like a small-market team. As Blogging the Boys broke down earlier this year, from 2013 to 2016, the Cowboys ranked 25th in the NFL in cash spending. (Cash spending is actual money being paid to players each year. There is no limit on the cash a team can spend each season as long as it is properly accounted for over a five-year window. This creates advantages for teams who spend sharply.) From 2016 to 2019, the Cowboys ranked dead last in cash spending. And from 2021 to 2023, the Cowboys ranked 30th. The trend has continued this season. As of mid-August, they ranked dead last in 2024 cash spending. And even after Lamb’s contract, they rank just 30th. Dallas is spending less money on its roster than the Arizona Cardinals, a team so notoriously cheap that two years ago, it deducted the cost of boxed dinners from players’ paychecks.
The Cowboys are stuck flat-footed between two eras: the Jerry era (or “Jera,” if you will), and that of Stephen Jones, Jerry’s son who is set to inherit the team. Stephen currently operates as the Cowboys’ chief operating officer and co-owner, and he has been working with the team since Jerry bought the franchise in 1989, when Stephen was 24 years old. According to the team website, Stephen was immediately given a “key front office position as one of three vice presidents with the club.” While Jerry Jones told Hill last month that he loves running the team, he also said he thinks his children would operate it well “if I get hit out here by a car tonight.” And in recent years, Stephen has reportedly taken on more control of the franchise—and attempted to bring about a new, spend-less identity.
The modern Dallas Cowboys are the product of this clunky transition. They seem to be following a path similar to that of the Lakers, going from Jerry Buss to his kids, or the Yankees, transitioning from George Steinbrenner to his sons. The kids lack the dad’s savvy, but they’ve inherited enough of a head start that they never bottom out—even if they’re not always competing. The result is a Cowboys organization that has become a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a team whose priority seems to be putting on a show while simultaneously keeping spending low.
Jerry Jones says a lot of wild stuff. He once got up in front of other NFL owners and described negotiations with the NFLPA as “the owls are fucking the chickens.” But even by Jerry’s standards, things have been going off the rails as of late.
Last year he said that winning the Super Bowl would feel like a “glory hole.” During the 2024 NFL draft weekend, Jones went on a soliloquy about how much he adored Texas running back Jonathon Brooks, how he was the most impressive combine interview he’d seen in 30 years, and how the Cowboys had him “high, high, high on their board”—until Stephen elbowed him and reminded his dad that they had not actually drafted Brooks yet. The Panthers leapfrogged Dallas via a trade and acquired Brooks with the no. 46 pick.
It is hard not to think of those moments when Dallas is continually ravaged in contract negotiations, by Ezekiel Elliott in 2019, Dak Prescott in 2021, and Lamb this year, when he held out for all of camp and got a top-of-market deal anyway. If Jones was willing to pay that, why not just do it a month ago and have Lamb at practice?
And then there are the playoff catastrophes, which have hampered the team’s image around the NFL in recent years. There was the loss to San Francisco in January 2022, when Dallas could not stop the clock with 19 seconds remaining (that same weekend, Kansas City drove down the field and scored a field goal in 13 seconds). They lost to San Francisco again in January 2023 on the most pathetic final play in recent playoff history—Elliott lining up at center and getting trucked. And then they lost to Green Bay in January 2024 in a noncompetitive game in which Dallas was down 32 points in the fourth quarter.
The fans have taken notice of all of this. For years, the Cowboys handed out press releases to the media boasting of attendance numbers for their training camp in Oxnard, California. The past couple of seasons, though, they stopped giving those out. This year, attendance was so low it was noticeable in the stands—and comparable to the training camp attendance of the Chargers, who are often mocked for not having fans.
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There is no question that Dallas needs Jerry to do a bit less. Yet he might already be doing less than we think.
According to reporting by Tyler Dunne at Go Long, Stephen Jones has more influence than ever in Dallas. And Dunne suggests that Stephen is more interested in making (and not spending) money than in winning football games. Stephen reportedly “went absolutely ballistic” on his dad for spending too much money on Deion Sanders in free agency in 1995—and according to Dunne’s piece, that’s not the only time he’s tried to tighten the purse strings. “Stephen’s always the one that’s trying to hone him in and prevent him from bankrupting the salary cap,” a source told Dunne. “And sometimes, it’s the right thing to do and sometimes it isn’t.”
But sometimes the Cowboys just seem cheap. The best example is with their coaching staff. It’s common practice not to let coaches operate on the final year of their deal. You either extend them, or you fire them. The thinking is you don’t want players to know that the coach is a lame duck because that would undermine their authority.
The only team that makes a habit of letting coaches work through the final year of their deal seems to be the Cowboys, who are doing it with Mike McCarthy this season and who did it with Jason Garrett in both 2015 and 2019. As Dunne reported, Stephen does not like to pay people not to work. That is why Garrett coached into his contract year multiple times.
While teams are happy to have motivated players on contract years—pressure makes diamonds, the saying goes—the belief rarely extends to coaches. I asked McCarthy in mid-August whether he felt that he was seeing the best out of his coaching staff as they all collectively enter what could be their final year with the team—and if he was seeing the pressure create those diamonds.
“Our coaching staff is already made of diamonds,” McCarthy said. “Those conversations, frankly, for us, were back in February. Once you make the commitment, and you understand the opportunity. … It’s a privilege to play and coach in this league. Trust me, none of us ever lose sight of that.”
Now, entering this NFL season, this lack of investment in the coaching staff and roster is about to be tested. Dallas’s pass catchers behind Lamb are tight end Jake Ferguson and declining speedster Brandin Cooks. Nobody else on the team has 25 career catches to their name. The offensive line is relying on two unproven rookies to start, though the Cowboys have often produced young gems on their line. Defensive coordinator Dan Quinn left for the Washington head-coaching job, taking half the D-line rotation with him, and those guys were essentially not replaced until Dallas added aging veterans like defensive tackles Jordan Phillips and Linval Joseph in recent weeks.
When Cowboys fans wonder why they haven’t reached an NFC championship game in three decades and the Eagles have made two Super Bowls in the past seven years, the answer is that the Eagles are shelling out over 50 percent more cash each season than Dallas. This year, for example, the Eagles are outspending the Cowboys in cash on their roster by $100 million. In football terms, the Eagles just want it more.
But the real coming calamity is how the Joneses have handled the Prescott situation. A few years ago, Stephen Jones was asked what the biggest mistake of his three-decade front office career was. “Probably would have signed Dak the first time around,” he said, describing a contract lapse that led the Cowboys to have to use the franchise tag on Prescott in 2020. “It would have been better for everybody.”
Three years later, Dallas is in the same spot—but it doesn’t have the opportunity to use the franchise tag on Prescott this time (Dallas agreed to a no-tag clause in Dak’s most recent contract). Prescott could walk in free agency in March and Dallas would get only a 2026 third-rounder in return. It would also cost the Cowboys $40 million of 2025 cap space for him to play elsewhere. Dak would likely be the most impactful free agent of all time, considering his talent and age. Maybe that sounds like hyperbole, but it is not. Tom Brady had plenty of cachet when he hit free agency in 2020, but he was 43 years old; Peyton Manning was in his mid-30s when he signed with the Broncos in 2012 but had a neck issue; and Kirk Cousins wasn’t as good as Dak when he got a fully guaranteed deal from the Vikings in 2018. Prescott might have three to five elite years left, plus maybe another decade in the NFL. It’s not unreasonable to think he could spend as much time with a potential second team as he has in Dallas.
If the Cowboys are considering letting Prescott leave, one wonders why they didn’t ask him to waive his no-trade clause this offseason so that they could deal him to a team like the Raiders. A Prescott trade sounds ridiculous. But Prescott walking just to put a $40 million hole in Dallas’s 2025 salary cap would be one of the most horrific roster mismanagement stories in NFL history. And if the Cowboys are going to re-sign him, it will be interesting to see how they build a team around him. Dallas is already reluctant to spend cash. But the team has a looming Parsons extension coming, along with Dak’s and Lamb’s, and it’s unclear how it might fit all those contracts into its newfound low budgets.
Dak now makes about as much money per quarter ($590,000) as he used to make per year ($680,000). Last season, Parsons and Lamb accounted for roughly 4 percent of Dallas’s cap. We aren’t far off from them being closer to 24 percent. Dak’s current deal has him at a 50 percent higher cap hit this season than Patrick Mahomes. How can Dallas put a better team on the field if it’s going to spend less on its surrounding players? As they say in The Wire, you don’t do more with less. You do less with less. Under this version of Jerry and Stephen Jones, the Cowboys are working with less than ever.
