There were many things we missed last year during the COVID-19 season that was in 2020. Jerry Jones talking to the media was one of those things.
Jerry Jones is good for the NFL, and yes, the NFL has been very, very good to Jerry Jones.
It was an emotional Cowboys owner who met with the media in the team’s training camp kickoff press conference from Oxnard, California. Jones is 78, and his window is closing -- if slowly -- on his chance to win a fourth Lombardi Trophy since he bought the team in 1989.
Jones is as optimistic about this season as he has been before every season since that 1995 season that delivered the team’s most recent trip to the NFC Championship Game and the franchise’s fifth -- and last -- Super Bowl title.
Jones admitted he’s “never thought we wouldn’t make it happen.”
Jones said he would write a check to win another Super Bowl, if that was possible, repeating something he has said often the past few years. He once stated he would pay $250 million to buy a Super Bowl.
So would he make a deal with the devil?
“I found that he’s not quite as responsive to one’s individual ask as you might think, and I’m not trying to be sacrilegious here, but the facts are that I would right now, if I could, and I knew that I had a good chance to do it, I’d do anything known to man to get in a Super Bowl,” Jones said Tuesday. “That’s a fact. There’s nothing, in my mind, that can have a higher priority than that. As you know, sometimes you have to make decisions to go back to step forward, and we’re faced with that in building a squad. You can’t have it all. You see several ways that you might be able to do something from my perspective to get better, but that will end up costing you down the road. That’s the pragmatic part when it goes. I feel as driven as I was when we first bought the team.
“I was scared to death then, and I’m scared to death now. I worry about what’s happened here with the economy and COVID, and I worry about our place in it, in the NFL and where the place is in sports. I worry about that. But the thing that means the most to me and I care about -- and I could be anywhere in the world I wanted to be right now -- I want to be here with our team.”
There is one thing Jones wouldn’t do for another Super Bowl: He previously has said he would not relinquish his spot in the Hall of Fame. But a Super Bowl isn’t for sale, and the Cowboys aren’t one of the favorites for this year’s prize.
So they will have to prove it on the field, something they have failed to do every year the past 25 years.