How ‘bout them Cowboys coaches?
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who continues to drag his feet on giving Jimmy Johnson his rightful spot among the franchise’s all-time greats, was asked about the failure to add Johnson on Monday.
This time, Jones deflected by suggesting there are other Cowboys coaches that belong there, too.
“We’re going to be making those announcements as we go,” Jones said, via Clarence E. Hill, Jr. of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “We’ll just let that go. I’ve got a couple of coaches, in addition to Jimmy, that ought to be in that Ring of Honor.”
Given that Tom Landry is already there and that, other than Johnson, the only Cowboys coaches were Barry Switzer, Dave Campo, Chan Gailey, Bill Parcells, Wade Phillips, Jason Garrett, and Mike McCarthy, what other coaches should be there? Per Hill, Jones declined to name names.
“I’m not going to talk about that,” Jones said. “But the point is that the Ring of Honor should be very, very exclusive. And it’s good that whatever we do, we get to talk about it as much as we do. It gets more attention than it does if we loaded it up.”
So it’s exclusive, but “a couple of coaches” other than Johnson should be in it? That would seem to undermine the exclusivity, given that none of them (other than Switzer) even made it to the NFC Championship.
The simple truth is that Jones gets to make the decisions, and Jones still resents the fact that Johnson gets far more credit for the construction of the team that was good enough to win two straight Super Bowls and a third one after he left. The tension that caused their relationship to fracture and disintegrate still lingers, nearly 30 years later.
And so, put simply, Jones is being petty, for one very basic reason.
Because he can.
