Dallas Cowboys 2024 Season Thread -- Jerrah the Asshat Rides Again

[Rex Kramer 1523]

14 minutes ago, 'stache said:

The absolute failure to prepare for and/or adjust during last year's playoff game should have been the death knell. I hate him and his fat fucking face. No faith whatsoever that he's capable of any real success. I agree he'll be back because if he wasn't canned after that attrocity Jerry Jones absolutely will not fire him for failing to make the playoffs this year with the injuires, etc., especially since nobody legitimate would ever consider working for dumbfuck Jerry.Fat Mike has proven to suck absolute shit, so whatever. If we win a Super Bowl with him I'll eat crow (LOL).

We won’t win a Super Bowl with him combined with Dak. But he’s a good coach. Much better than Dak is a QB. His face or rather looks of bewilderment after some plays bother me. Reminds me of Wade. But nobody makes more irate than the overly involved Fassell. 

[dcar00 14896]

2 hours ago, Rex Kramer said:

I’d think 10-7 would get in. 9-8 has a small chance. 

I don’t think McCarthy is losing his job. Or at least it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s being discussed heavily in Dallas media. I do think MM has been a good coach, do think he’s done well to somewhat salvaging this season, and do think this board and others are ridiculous in their criticism of him. However, I don’t know how I feel about him being retained. Nobody outside of a Parcells type that can withstand Jerry for more than 5 years, that is given personnel autonomy is going to win big in Dallas. And we know the ego of a Jimmy or Parcells cannot coexist with Jerry for more than 3-4 years, and now really would never entertain accepting the Dallas job. 

So all this goes back to, what’s the best alternative?  A young smart OC that would probably laugh at Jerry?  Yeah, that’d be preferable but it ain’t happening. MM is competent. If we are gonna change something I’d much rather it be QB than HC. 

sure, but Jerry already locked in the QB, the only thing he can change at this point is the Coach.

[Pescado_Rojo 19546]

4 hours ago, Rex Kramer said:

I’d think 10-7 would get in. 9-8 has a small chance. 

I don’t think McCarthy is losing his job. Or at least it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s being discussed heavily in Dallas media. I do think MM has been a good coach, do think he’s done well to somewhat salvaging this season, and do think this board and others are ridiculous in their criticism of him. However, I don’t know how I feel about him being retained. Nobody outside of a Parcells type that can withstand Jerry for more than 5 years, that is given personnel autonomy is going to win big in Dallas. And we know the ego of a Jimmy or Parcells cannot coexist with Jerry for more than 3-4 years, and now really would never entertain accepting the Dallas job. 

So all this goes back to, what’s the best alternative?  A young smart OC that would probably laugh at Jerry?  Yeah, that’d be preferable but it ain’t happening. MM is competent. If we are gonna change something I’d much rather it be QB than HC. 

Good news is Jerry probably doesn't have 3-4 years, so...

['stache 22115]

4 hours ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

Good news is Jerry probably doesn't have 3-4 years, so...

Oh please that evil old bastard will be kicking for another 20 fucking years.

[Rex Kramer 1523]

6 hours ago, dcar00 said:

sure, but Jerry already locked in the QB, the only thing he can change at this point is the Coach.

He cannot run anymore. Hes not that accurate. He might think he’s locked in but I doubt he starts here much longer. 

[dcar00 14896]

13 minutes ago, Rex Kramer said:

He cannot run anymore. Hes not that accurate. He might think he’s locked in but I doubt he starts here much longer. 

yes we agree on dak's limitations.  Jerry is locked in for the duration of the contract.  he wants to win with the guy he found in the 4th. It is ALL ego at this point, money, right personnel decisions for the future don't matter. 

[HRSchenker 2330]

Texas Monthly just named Jerry Jones the 2024 Bum Steer of the Year

Quote

In the film adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel Interview With the Vampire, the title character, Louis de Pointe du Lac, describes with a sad triumphalism the experience of witnessing one final sunrise before he joins the legions of the undead. “I watched the whole magnificence of the dawn for the last time as if it were the first,” he said. “And then I said farewell to sunlight and set out to become what I became.”   

More recently, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones also shared some thoughts about the sun. After wide receiver CeeDee Lamb complained about losing track of a pass in the blinding glare that crashes through the glass on the west side of AT&T Stadium each fall, Jones went on a rant. “We know where the sun is going to be when we decide to flip the coin or not, so we do know where the damn sun is going to be in our own stadium,” Jones growled during a postgame chat with reporters. “Let’s just tear the damn stadium down and build another one,” he added sarcastically. “The world knows where the sun is. . . . What about the sun? Where’s the moon? We’re fine.”   

Jones may lack the stylistic grace of Rice’s fabled creature of the night, but waxing poetic about the great celestial body is hardly the only thing that he and Louis have in common: They both thrive by sucking dry the lifeblood of others, leaving behind nothing but a pile of withered husks.   

Jones’s fanged stewardship of the Cowboys began in 1989, when he purchased the team for $140 million after a notably checkered career as a businessman. Flush with cash he borrowed from the Teamsters as a fresh-faced 23-year-old former college football player, he opted in 1966 not to buy the American Football League’s San Diego Chargers a few months before the league’s merger with the NFL nearly doubled the team’s value. Instead, he poured the money into unsellable real estate and unappealing fast food, opening a series of Shakey’s Pizza Parlors, all of which closed.

Still, this scion of a wealthy family, who married into an even wealthier one, managed to find access to more capital and entered the energy business. He hit a stroke of good fortune—twelve of the first thirteen wells he drilled struck oil—which seemed to convince him that he was a business genius. 

Upon taking ownership of the Cowboys, Jones fired legendary head coach Tom Landry, installing his University of Arkansas football teammate Jimmy Johnson in the role and grabbing the general manager spot for himself soon after. Despite many fans’ skepticism, these turned out to be good moves: The team won back-to-back Super Bowls in the 1992 and 1993 seasons. Jones honored this achievement by telling reporters that “five hundred coaches” could have won the Super Bowl with such a talented roster—a statement that was seen as a rebuke of Johnson, who was perhaps basking in more of the sunshine than Jones liked.   

Johnson resigned before the 1994 season began, and Jones hired another pal from his college days, Barry Switzer, who led the team to another Super Bowl win, in his second year. By 1998, though, Switzer was gone, and the Cowboys soon slid into long-term mediocrity. Between 2000 and 2016 the team posted a record of 128–128, never making it past the divisional round of the playoffs, with a trio of consecutive 5–11 seasons in the early aughts representing the team’s nadir. Amid the dreary 2010 season, this magazine named Jones cowinner of our Bum Steer of the Year Award, alongside the then ailing Texas Longhorns. In the decade-plus since, Cowboys players have spent each Super Bowl Sunday hosting watch parties from home.   

Why has the team sunk so low? Blame Jones. Compared to other NFL GMs, he spends shockingly little on his coaching staff. He makes decisions unilaterally. He publicly second-guesses decisions his coaches make in the heat of combat and undermines them in other ways, including defending players who break team rules. He can’t stop himself from acting impulsively, both in his role as the Cowboys’ owner and GM and in his scandalous personal life. Today’s world is full of tech bros who have hit it big in one sector and decided they can run anything they put their minds to—and Jones is their spiritual granddaddy.   

Even fielding a decent team doesn’t solve the Jerry problem. Over the past decade, the Cowboys have played pretty well—and yet, paradoxically, rooting for them has been more soul-crushing than ever. The team has frequently looked good; it has made the playoffs more often than not, and draft picks such as CeeDee Lamb and Micah Parsons have developed into superstars. Dak Prescott is a nigh perennial Pro Bowler and finished second in MVP voting last season.   

But the Cowboys never made it to the big game after 1996. And many fans no longer celebrate the team’s regular-season successes. “[The Cowboys] will never win s— because Jerry Jones can’t help himself,” Fox Sports analyst and former NFL lineman Mark Schlereth said in 2023. “They may win a bunch of regular-season games because they’re talented, but they’ll get in the playoffs and they’ll s— in their helmets like they do every year.”   

The death of hope among Cowboys fans can be traced to an exact date, time, and place. The team spent the 2023 season among the NFL’s best, putting up forty points or more in five separate games. The roster was star-studded and healthy, and the squad hadn’t lost a home game since the start of the previous season. Fans who hadn’t dared dream of a Super Bowl since the days of Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith allowed themselves to believe. 

And then, on January 14, 2024, during the wild card round of the playoffs, they watched as the underdog Green Bay Packers scored four touchdowns in the first half while the Cowboys squatted over their helmets. The Cowboys gave up touchdowns on the ground. They gave up touchdowns through the air. They gave up a touchdown to the Packers defense before the Cowboys offense even sniffed the end zone! America’s Team looked like a scrappy JV squad playing against a group of NFL all-stars, courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation.   

The offseason that followed inspired no hope. Despite the playoffs disaster, Jones retained head coach Mike McCarthy but dithered for months over whether or not to sign Lamb and Prescott to new contracts, leaving the team’s best players in limbo and the organization’s salary cap too uncertain for it to pursue free agents.   

Cowboys fans, who had stuck around through decades of thick and thin and thinner, grew restless. Spectator attendance at training camp this past summer in Oxnard, California, was “lower than ever,” said one report, as photos of empty bleacher seats circulated on social media. If Jones couldn’t be bothered to make changes during the offseason, even the diehards wondered, what would be different this year?  

Well, here’s what turned out to be different: The Cowboys didn’t wait until the playoffs to tarnish the stars on their helmets. Things started out badly enough in late summer, when Jones, inexplicably, re-signed Lamb and Prescott for eye-popping nine-figure sums just as the season started—a move that came so late it ensured that the ’Boys pursued no notable free agents and that Lamb had an excuse to spend the entire offseason away from the team. Just so Jones could give the pair everything they wanted—which he could have done months earlier!   

Those bad choices played out quickly on the field. At press time, the team had a 5–7 record and had lost its first five home games—a feat that helped get Tom Landry fired in 1988. The Cowboys became the first team in NFL history to trail by twenty or more points in six consecutive home games. That streak included a home opener against the lowly New Orleans Saints in which the Cowboys lost 44–19 after giving up touchdowns on the opponent’s first six possessions. They were bested by the Baltimore Ravens in a game in which the Cowboys entered the fourth quarter down 28–6. They suffered a shattering 47–9 thrashing by the Detroit Lions, then lost two games on the road and returned home to be humiliated by the hated Philadelphia Eagles, 34–6. The skid continued with a 34–10 loss to the Houston Texans on Monday Night Football. As Prescott, according to countless amateur lip readers, said from the sidelines in the middle of one demoralizing defeat, “We f—ing suck.”

A two-game winning streak that, at press time, saw the team claw its way closer to .500 barely made a dent in the franchise’s image—a seven-point defeat of the New York Giants, one of the worst teams in the league, didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Even the most star-pilled Cowboys fan couldn’t convince himself that backup quarterback Cooper Rush was about to lead the team to the Super Bowl, so what was there to hope for? 

A mathematically possible playoff berth, insisted Jones, who throughout all of this has behaved like the world’s oldest, weirdest toddler. After his sun rant, he doubled down by insisting that the blinding light gives the Cowboys a home-field advantage because they’re used to it, a hilariously specious claim. After Prescott suffered a season-ending injury, Jones claimed that the offense was looking better under Rush—whose first effort in relief saw him put up some of the worst passing numbers for an NFL starting quarterback in decades—than when his $240 million star was on the field. (At pretty much the same time, head coach McCarthy lamented not giving third-stringer Trey Lance a shot. Just so long as everyone’s on the same page, fellas!) Jones even tore into a sports-radio host who questioned his offseason decisions, insisting that asking him about those choices is “not your job” and threatening to get him fired.  

Any other general manager who’d acted this way, who’d spent decades failing to build a Super Bowl–worthy roster or give his coaches the breathing room to shape such a team, would have been fired long ago—presumably to be replaced by someone with new ideas, fresh energy, and the motivation to succeed or risk losing the job. Jones, though, is the only NFL team owner who also serves as GM. Because he’s his own boss, he faces no accountability so long as fans continue to attend games and watch them on TV, making the Cowboys the world’s most valuable sports team, worth an estimated $11 billion.

In 2001 this magazine put Jones on its cover dressed as Satan, alongside the headline “Is Jerry Jones the Devil?” But Cowboys fans aren’t in hell—they’re trapped in a purgatory from which there’s little hope of escape. Even the eventual passing of the aged Arkansan might not bring relief from this mediocrity. Given that Jones has made ruining the Cowboys a family business, he is all but certain to be succeeded by his son Stephen, the team’s director of player personnel, who has had a hand in the same decisions that have made his father’s name a curse uttered throughout the state. The Cowboys’ roster choices and coaching decisions might be made for generations to come by dilettante hobbyists accountable to no one. Like the vampires of lore, Jerry Jones’s legacy may well be eternal.   

That’s why he is once again our Bum Steer of the Year—this time all by his lonesome. 

 

[dcar00 14896]

23 minutes ago, HRSchenker said:

Texas Monthly just named Jerry Jones the 2024 Bum Steer of the Year

 

have to admit I didn't know about the teamster money and potentially buying the chargers.  Is that true?

[TwiceHorn 31972]

56 minutes ago, HRSchenker said:

while the Cowboys squatted over their helmets

Lmao.

Reminded me of this, even though it's not what they meant.

[TwiceHorn 31972]

38 minutes ago, dcar00 said:

have to admit I didn't know about the teamster money and potentially buying the chargers.  Is that true?

The 23 year old part kind of blew me away, as did the rich family and richer Chambers family of Gene.  But it seems to be true.

His folks owned a couple of grocery stores, then an insurance company that got much bigger under their ownership.  That's a classic teamsters investment from back then.

[DougO 5261]

Cowboys move to the 14th slot in the draft order as it stands now. Tied with several 6-8 teams, ahead of most  based on strength of schedule. Need to root for Miami, Indy, Cincy and Niners to win some games, maybe 5-9 New Orleans to go on a run. It would be nice to keep the Cowboys in the 14 or under slot while still playing well and getting confidence going into next season.