Jerry Jones stepped in it earlier this week.
During an interview with the Wall Street Journal earlier this week about Comstock and their search through some of the deepest wells in the United States, the Dallas Cowboys owner told the interviewer that matters there were so important that he was prioritizing them over fixing the Cowboys defense.
Jones has poured more than $1 billion into natural gas driller Comstock Resources, betting it can drill some of the hottest, deepest wells in the U.S.—and unleash a torrent of new gas supplies.
Comstock says it is set to do just that. It has trumped hellish geology and cranked out dozens of gushers. It has also gone on a stealthy land grab and controls a large chunk of a region it calls the Western Haynesville. As a result, it says it is gearing up to pump enough fuel to help meet the soaring needs of exporters, data centers and heavy industries for years to come.
Now, Jones says, it’s payday. “There’s $100 billion present value with gas out there,” the 83-year-old billionaire said in an interview. “That’s why I’m talking to you on the telephone rather than trying to fix our defense with the Dallas Cowboys.”
It isn’t hard to see how this would upset your average Cowboys fan. The team is losing and is still trying to find itself since losing in the 2023 Wild Card Round to the Green Bay Packers. That an enormous amount of off-the-field drama has encircled the franchise ever since, a lot of it centering around contract extensions and the practices involved with not doing them efficiently, has not really helped. The fact that the team’s best player, Micah Parsons, was traded to the Packers has made things more exhausting.
The point is that people are mad. Their favorite football team is disappointing them and they do not feel like the franchise’s leadership is doing enough to fix the situation. You can see how this quote would corroborate that assumption. It would stand to reason that Jerry would know this when giving a recorded interview which is why it comes across as tone deaf.
In the initial days after the quote there were all sorts of comments across the internet of fans expressing their outrage about it. Jerry was asked about the quote during his Friday appearance on 105.3 The Fan and essentially defended his oil ventures as matters that financially support what the Cowboys do on the football field.
As transcribed by the mothership’s Tommy Yarrish:
“We probably will get criticized if we aren’t doing that. Goodness, I understand that perspective, we all get it. Let’s just say what’s going on here is we’re not winning, we’re not playing the way we want to be, the way I want to be, the way any of us want to be. And when you do that, you check your whole card with everything you’re doing. You check where you spend your time, how you spend it, and that’s what’s going on here. It’s no secret at all that ever since I’ve been involved, my days are involved, in a manner of speaking, in many areas. I frankly don’t know many people in football that don’t have their days involved in different areas. To the degree is of course debatable. This is called professional football to make a point. That means it takes money to make it all go. Money. And so that any time, that I’m doing anything that’s away from looking at a specific player and how he’s playing defense, it has to do with the latter. And ultimately, that latter leads ultimately to the benefit of the Cowboys. Me sitting here talking on this phone with you, the visits that I’m having with our fans through you, that’ll help score touchdowns. Because it ultimately involves in a way that makes it doable, and there’s no, in the real world, Santa Claus does not put the tricycle on the Christmas tree, we all know that. You have to have juice to make it go. So I’ve always combined and never been unabashed about it since the day I walked in. Every day, every time I can, I’m looking for ways to give advantages to the Dallas Cowboys. Anybody that says I don’t focus on the Cowboys is just living in the moment of frustration, and I get that, and I’m frustrated too.”
Jerry is totally fair to note that NFL owners – billionaires – have important financial matters to tend to. I don’t think that there is a single person who is shocked or bothered by this reality.
The difference between Jerry and your other average owner is that he is more involved in the day-to-day operations of his team. We can certainly debate how much that is, or likely is, in modern times, but you get the point.
Beyond that lies the actual point which is that Jerry said something incredibly tone deaf. He outright declared to the interviewer that the subject at hand was more of a priority to him than the state of the football team. Even if it was tongue-in-cheek or an off-hand comment in a casual conversation (that was being recorded for the interview to be clear) it was unwise. Jones literally used his own defense, the one he boasts responsibility for assembling, as a punchline.
There have been a number of instances where Jerry has put his foot in his mouth and the world has kept on moving after each one of them like it will in this case. Nobody is pretending anything else is reality.
It was a silly thing to say. That’s all that Jerry had to say about it.
Instead… well. Yea.
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