More than 11 years after uttering one of his most notorious lines, Cowboys owner and G.M. Jerry Jones is still searching for gloryhole.
And he still believes it’s just a matter of time before he finds it.
Jones explained to Peter King during his ongoing training-camp tour that he still believes the Cowboys can win the Super Bowl. Even though they haven’t been to the NFC Championship in 28 years. Twenty-eight years! The team existed for only 29 seasons before Jones bought it, and it had been to a whopping 12 conference championships in that time.
Twelve conference championships in the team’s first 29 years. Zero in the past 28. And yet Jones still stubbornly believes.
“I know how hard it is to win [a Super Bowl],” Jones told King. “You shouldn’t give up the ghost because you fall short in a highly competitive league. Just because we haven’t won it in so long doesn’t make what we’ve done meaningless. And I think this year we’re in better position to win it than we have been in years. We have the team, and we have the quarterback.”
You shouldn’t give up the ghost for many reasons beyond the highly-competitive nature of the league. You shouldn’t give up the ghost because making fans believe you haven’t given up the ghost helps fill the stadiums and attract millions of eyeballs during games.
The Cowboys will ultimately count on quarterback Dak Prescott to make fans believe. And so Jerry still believes.
“Very much. Very much,” Jones said. “We’re relying on him, and I feel very good about that. His preparation, his presence, how the team responds to him. I believe he will get us there.”
There’s a carnival barker aspect for NFL franchises, and the owners sometimes are the ones best suited to doing the barking. Look at Colts owner Jim Irsay. Think of all the times he has boasted about his belief that the Colts will win more and more and more championships — and they’ve won only one since his father, Robert, swapped the Rams for the Colts in 1972.
Is Irsay a zealous fan who refuses to acknowledge reality? Or is he simply trying to make sure that his customers are zealous fans who refuse to acknowledge reality?
The same can be asked about Jones. Even without winning a game in the divisional round IN TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS, the Cowboys and Jones have made millions upon millions upon millions. The value of the team has skyrocketed. He has won, many times over, despite his team not winning.
Are some owners tormented by not winning the Super Bowl in any given year? Probably. But if an owner in a highly-competitive league defines success solely by winning Super Bowls, that owner will have spent most of his or her life feeling like an abject failure.
Until, that is, he or she takes a look at the bank accounts and the balance sheet. They’re all winners. Every year. And part of that winning is to make the fans think that, in every single year, they’re trying desperately to win.
Again, maybe Jones believes it. If he does, for all the success he has had in the past three decades, he’s ultimately had a miserable 28 years. Even with the stadium and the superyacht and everything else he has been able to buy since the Cowboys last won a Super Bowl in January 1996, he has been miserable.
I don’t buy it. But if he truly has been miserable every year since the commencement of the 1996 season, his mistaken utterance of “gloryhole” back in 2012 becomes far more tragedy than comedy.