BroBible
In 2014, the Dallas Cowboys held the No. 16 overall pick in the NFL Draft after a third consecutive 8-8 season. Nearly everyone expected them to use that pick on Texas A&M superstar quarterback Johnny Manziel. But that didn’t happen, and now we know exactly why.
Stephen Jones, the son of the Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and the team’s CEO and director of player personnel, recently sat down with Sports Business Journal Publisher and Executive Editor Abe Madkour as part of the outlet’s “On Stage” series to discuss what went down on draft night in 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJwasYVHzbU
Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo was still considered one of the league’s best signal-callers at the time. But Romo recently turned 34 years old. And Manziel was the type of flashy superstar that Jerry Jones was known to covet. Add in the fact that Manziel was a Texas native who played his college ball in-state and it felt like an obvious fit.
But as Stephen Jones tells it, he and others stepped in to prevent his father from making a potentially disastrous selection.
“Well, sure enough, Johnny Manziel falls to us,” Stephen Jones says when discussing the story (21-minute mark of the above video). “…And I go, ‘Dad, this is a hard thing because everybody knows you want Johnny.’ But I go, ‘As you heard some of the things… I don’t think he’s the right guy for us.'”
Stephen Jones then noted that everyone in the Cowboys’ War Room is sitting with their heads down, not wanting to be the one to tell Jerry Jones that they plan to select a different player.
Ultimately, Dallas passed on Manziel. The Cowboys used the No. 16 pick to select Zack Martin, and Jerry Jones laid into his son over the decision.
“And so, roll the clock forward—we end up picking Zack Martin. And boy, it is tense. Usually after every pick, we’re all clapping, high-fiving—[saying] ‘Boy, isn’t that a great pick.’ Well, after we pick Zack Martin, an offensive guard from Notre Dame, Jerry looks over at me, slaps me on the leg, and he goes:
“‘Son, I didn’t get to buy the Dallas Cowboys… we’re not sitting here ’cause you do down-the-middle-of-the-road things.’ He goes, ‘What you just did is down the middle. You’ll never be great.'”
Fast forward just over a decade, and Martin just finished a likely Hall of Fame career. He made nine Pro Bowl appearances and seven All-Pro first teams. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Browns selected Manziel with the No. 22 overall pick. He went on to crash out of the league after just two seasons while dealing with drug and alcohol addictions.
Manziel later said that his off-field issues would’ve been even worse had he gone to Dallas. So it’s safe to say things worked out for all involved parties, to varying degrees. But Stephen Jones didn’t say whether his dad ever apologized for his brutal critique of...
