In his never-ending quest to find the genie that escaped the bottle, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones remains on a long, dark losing streak.
The lesson here is not that money can’t buy happiness. Jones has a new $250-million yacht, with a helipad, that can disprove that.
No, the lesson is the one that greed and insecurity teach you. Owner Jones once wasn’t nearly as rich nor as secure in his Arkansas skin.
Hence, he was among the NFL owners in 1994 who pushed for the institution of a salary cap.
Fearing rising player salaries, Jerry and the owners spoke of yearning for “cost certainties.”
They got them, and now Jones and son Stephen find themselves playing a dangerous game of Hide the Benjamins with the franchise’s most valuable defensive player, DeMarcus Lawrence.
These things take time, the Cowboys’ media apologists were quick to say Monday, after the team bestowed the franchise tag upon Lawrence for the second year in a row.
Oh, really? Time? Lawrence told the team a full year ago not to use the franchise tag again.
The NFL owners once wanted cost certainty. Lawrence wants income certainty – guaranteed cash with a long-term deal. The Cowboys have until July 15 to settle on a new deal, or . . .
Or what? Ask the Pittsburgh Steelers.
But therein lies my point. The Joneses are fully within their rights to use the mechanisms within the salary cap system in order to secure their rights to Lawrence for the coming season.
Lawrence, on the other hand, has every right to reject the owner’s one-year offer.
Those are the rules. Rules scripted and agreed upon in the collective bargaining process.
Thus, you have Jerry Jones who, according to Forbes, is worth nearly three times more than Oprah turning his pockets inside-out. It’s not a good look.
But it’s what Jones and the other owners wanted in the mid-1990s. Players association negotiators only heard the phrase “67 percent of team revenues” and failed to think it through. It didn’t take long for the average franchise’s top 10 players to be earning 48 percent of each team’s cap space.
From his luxury mega-bus, parked at the NFL Scouting Combine, Owner Jones can talk a good game, suggesting the Cowboys will lavish financial satisfaction on all of their key players. But son Stephen still has to make the math work.
The salary cap. Oh, the irony.
Indulge me for a moment to think about an NFL with no salary cap. An NFL like Major League Baseball.
Jerry Jones would be George Steinbrenner on steroids. He would be signing Manny Machado, Bryce Harper and Mike Trout.
Does anyone doubt this? With no salary cap, Jones would be coveting and writing checks to every free agent that caught his fancy.
Forbes estimates Jerry’s worth as $6.9 billion. A $1 billion player payroll would be a drop in the bucket.
Jones, of all the owners, fumbled the ball on this. Jerry successfully sued and arm-twisted the league into allowing teams to cut their own deals for sponsored revenue. In the Cowboys’ case, it was Nike, Pepsi, American Express, Miller beer, Ford, WinStar Casino . . . the list goes on.
All that money isn’t going to Tank Lawrence or, soon, Dak Prescott. It’s going into Jerry’s pocket, because his payroll costs are already fixed.
This is one time, though, that Owner Jones, at age 76, probably isn’t smiling his way to the bank.
“The hunger right now is winning a Super Bowl, not to get another billion dollars,” Jones said during his bus-talk with the media last week at the Combine.
“This is my 30th combine and I don’t have 30 more. I’m running out of combines.”
The late Tex Schramm harbored an obsession with maintaining the league’s parity. Such a democratic view was easy, of course, from the penthouse suite that the old Cowboys enjoyed.
Jones, however, saw the NFL’s cash pile as a piñata. His early deals with Nike and Pepsi, in particular, ruffled high feathers.
Jones was destined for immense wealth. Why would he have wanted a salary cap?
Insecurity, probably. Jerry still likes to tell the story of his cash-strapped pre-Cowboys days when the guy at the car rental counter took the scissors to his MasterCard.
An annual limit on NFL player salaries? Jones was a prominent proponent.
With unlimited spending, who knows what rabbit holes Jerry Jones might have taken the Cowboys down?
The Cowboys would be the Yankees. No – they’d be the Yankees and the Dodgers. Pro football would look very different.
Instead, here were the Joneses on Monday, playing stupid salary cap games with DeMarcus Lawrence.
The one thing Jerry wants, he can’t buy.
