The Cowboys are more reality show than football team

No one captures more headlines and generates more content (specifically for the morning shows with a never-ending bloodlust for Cowboys headlines) for a perpetually pedestrian football product than Jones. And at 82, ain’t nothing gonna ever change about that. He played all of the hits and checked all of the boxes when the Cowboys arrived in Oxnard, California, for training camp, such as alienating a segment of his locker room by taking shots at players (and their injuries), defending a string of transactional faux pas and riffing on why no one else is better equipped to tend to the roster than he is. And, of course, milking another contract impasse for all it’s worth before that, too, meets an inevitable conclusion with superstar pass rusher Micah Parsons getting a record contract.

If this all feels like a staged reality show, well, that’s just how this billionaire prefers it. The business of the Cowboys will once again eclipse the on-field product in the eyes of evaluators around the league, who never underestimate their profit margins but anticipate them being an afterthought in the standings again.

“That’s not a playoff team,” said one general manager, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a rival team. “It’s just Jerry being Jerry.”

If nothing else, Jones has guaranteed a top-heavy roster with bloated contracts for his best players. The haves get overpaid, eventually, and the have-nots scrap for every crumb — and Jones’s lust for value leads to him taking risk after risk on players with dubious character or proclivities. (Spotrac ranked Dallas just 16th in cash spent in 2024, 11th in 2023 and 29th in 2022.) If this is supposed to be one of the most profitable teams on the planet being all-in to win a title, the Cowboys have a funny way of showing it — including hiring journeyman coordinator and rookie head coach Brian Schottenheimer, who also works really cheap and comes with an affordable staff.

“They don’t make a lot of sense to me, in general, to begin with as a football operation,” said a high-ranking official of an NFC team who is not permitted to speak about players under contract to other teams, per the NFL’s tampering rules. “So a lot of what they do is head-scratching. Their appetite for lack of character is hard to stomach, I don’t understand why they keep painting themselves in a corner in negotiations, and they regularly push more money into the future [on contracts] than I’m comfortable doing as an operator.

“I thought the world of Brian Schottenheimer’s dad [former NFL coach Marty] and I’ve heard he’s a great dude, but you’re telling me he’s a program builder? And he can handle Jerry and that locker room? They continue to buy affordable talent because it comes with character issues and they get a market discount up front, but it quickly catches up with them. And their culture is warped and they don’t win big games.”

Then there are the on-field matters.

Jones seems infatuated with Dak Prescott, his $60 million quarterback earning his paycheck by chucking the ball all over the place, while the Cowboys’ infrastructure has slowly decayed. They’re unable to run the football or stop the run.

“It really wasn’t the [Deshaun] Watson [fully guaranteed] contract that was the problem,” said one AFC general manager, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss another contract. “It was Jerry giving a $40 million quarterback $60 million. Jerry is the guy who really [screwed] up the QB market for everybody else.”

Dallas ranked 30th in yards per carry in 2024, had the fewest rushing touchdowns in the NFL (six) and averaged an atrocious 1.08 yards before contact (a sign of the decay of a once-great offensive line), tied with the Las Vegas Raiders for worst in the NFL. The Cowboys simultaneously allowed 4.8 yards per carry (30th), 1.98 yards before contact (31st) and 25 rushing touchdowns (32nd), staggering differentials that have seemingly only been cosmetically addressed at best.

“Their defensive tackles actually made me sick watching their film last year against the run,” said one longtime NFL scout and evaluator who wrote up the Cowboys’ interior defense last year. “Disgusting.”

Schottenheimer isn’t fixing any of this overnight, and the cultural flaws are woven into the very fabric and brand of the team. Switching from Mike Zimmer to Matt Eberflus at defensive coordinator should mitigate the number of big plays allowed, but Jones already has put the team’s highly paid defensive backs on notice for injuries and slippage, and Parsons is accustomed to being granted extreme freedom to hunt sacks and freelance. Once he’s the highest-compensated defensive player in the NFL, the need to sate the owner by filling Parsons’s stat sheet only intensifies.

“What they like to do with the undersized front worked when [previous defensive coordinator Dan Quinn] was there, but not with Zimmer,” the NFC exec said. “They aren’t built the way they need to be for that defense to really work. They have to be in a favorable third down to unleash their potential pass rush, and they have to be playing with the lead to hunt the quarterback, but they can’t win on first or second down enough to get into those situations.”

Dallas allowed 6.4 yards per play on first down last season (tied for second worst in the NFL) and generated just 5.1 yards per play on first down (22nd) — again, these are troubling metrics that stand to undermine another season. Keeping Prescott healthy would help, but expect plenty of overinflated totals from chasing games in garbage time and padding stats to keep Jones from erupting about all of the money he has invested in the quarterback and his receivers. He’ll have plenty else to bemoan, regardless — almost all of it the owner’s own doing.