Blogging The Boys
Jerry Jones could not be farther away from the way an NFL owner should act if they care about winning.
It has often been said that the NFL is a copycat league. People look to the way the successful teams are working and try to emulate it in hopes of having their own success. That is common sense.
In the coming months we will see a lot of teams try to make themselves in the image of the Philadelphia Eagles and that makes sense given how Philly just dismantled the Kansas City Chiefs for their second world championship since 2017. The reality is that, as much as we hate them, the Eagles are a model franchise in modern times in terms of how they go about the football part of their business.
That last sentence is important when talking about and assessing the Dallas Cowboys. The “football” of everything tends to get lost in the everything else which makes the thing that fans care most about seem to suffer. A drought, whether Stephen Jones wants to call it that or not, only reaches three decades for a reason.
If the Cowboys are taking any page out of Philly’s playbook this offseason then there are a number of things to choose from. But chief among them, no pun intended, should be the way that ownership goes about caring for the football part of the operation.
Maybe you care about the Cowboys being the most valuable professional sports franchise in the world. Around 10 years ago it was a cool thing to say and a weird point of pride. Obviously that has gotten old as the franchise has continued to falter.
Bragging about the financial value of the team is sort of bragging about team ownership and that is something that sports fans rarely do; however, Eagles fans have every reason to brag about their ownership because Jeffrey Lurie seems to understand what they want.
Consider that Lurie bought the Eagles just five years after Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys. Comparing which owner is more successful seems like a waste of time, but consider that the latter now only has one more title than the former.
Albert Breer had a great piece about Lurie and his ownership of the Eagles relative to the success that they have had over the last decade. One part stood out where Lurie discussed finding financial liberty to keep the team competitive on an annual basis.
“My philosophy is …” Lurie said, pausing for a second to consider the question. “You’re obviously trying to run a sound business, but I think success is determined by your success on the field and your success in the community. And so anything you can do to maximize those two, the value of the team is going to be appreciated more by your performance and your reputation in the community than anything else. It’s not going to be the...
