Cowboys Hall of Fame wide receiver Michael Irvin was a consummate competitor, to the point where he was willing to violate a personal code to get rid of teammates who didn’t have the passion for winning that he had.
Irvin recalled on Undeniable with Joe Buck that in his rookie year with the Cowboys, when they went 3-13, he grew angry, depressed and frustrated with the losing. He was shocked to find how many of his veteran teammates didn’t let losing bother them.
“I was nearly crying in the locker room after we would lose games and a lot of guys would come by and say, ‘Come on, man, you’re in the pros now. We don’t do that in the pros. Just make sure you pick up that check on Tuesday.’ I was blown away with this, man. I was like, ‘Man, this is the NFL?’ It was the hardest year for me, to get through that year with all that losing,” Irvin said.
After Irvin’s rookie year, new Cowboys owner Jerry Jones hired Jimmy Johnson as head coach. Irvin had previously played for Johnson at Miami, and he immediately called Johnson to tell him about the players who didn’t care enough. Johnson didn’t tolerate it.
“When Jerry bought the team and we heard Jimmy was coming in, I went home and called Coach Johnson. And you know how, as brothers we have this thing, ‘I don’t snitch’? Man, I was snitching,” Irvin said. “‘Hey, man, this dude’s gotta go. He’s gotta go. He’s not about winning.’ And it took Coach about the first few months, first year, but boy, he started getting rid of everybody. And we got people in like the people we had at Miami that wanted to win.”
Irvin wanted to win badly enough that if he had to snitch to get rid of bad teammates, then he was happy to snitch.