I don’t know of a suitable description or name for the Giants. When they are bad, they are bad (which is most of the time,) but when they are good, they are spectacularly good (2007 and 2011). Bipolar?
He defined it as “in the same families hands for multiple generations” so by his own rubric, they count. He noted that the Cowboys would enter the list when Jerry dies and Steven takes over for the same reason even though we know that Jerry famously bought the team in the 80s. If you want to re-define it as “being in the same family as the original founder” then the list gets a lot shorter, basically the Bears, Giants, Bengals, Raiders, Titans, Chiefs and Steelers.
Many of you have called out Jerry Jones for meddling in the Cowboys affairs. While he certainly can stick his nose in and make a mess of things, he’s not really “meddling” per se.
Jones runs the Cowboys like a mom-and-pop family business. For him to be a “meddling owner” he’d have to be inserting himself into the front office and overriding the “football guys” he hired to make the decisions…but he’s never done that. He’s the “football guy-in-chief” and always has been. Certainly some of his coaches have wrested a little control from him for short periods, but in balance, Jerry is just running his team when he does silly shit. You can’t meddle with yourself.
If there’s an indictment to be made of Jerry Jones, it’s not his meddling, it’s his unwillingness to run his $13B business like a proper company. He’s never had a real GM. He doesn’t really take his scouting department seriously. He negotiates the contracts, even though the rules have gotten way more complex than they were in the 90s. He hires coaches based on how likely they are to indulge and placate him. The world famous Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are run like a damn sorority.
Jimmy Johnson really gave Jerry a false sense of his genius. And damn near 40 years later and Jerry is still “doing what worked” back then.
Last I looked, siblings don’t count as multiple generations.
Cue the deep south jokes!
You’re basically arguing that since he’s GM on paper, he can’t be “meddling” by definition. Which is true I suppose.
But the point most people are making when they say that he meddles is that as the owner, he has no business being involved in anything close to the day-to-day running of the team, much less making personnel decisions like who’s going to start each week. That’s what the coach and a GM who’s NOT the owner should be doing.
And Jones is certainly smart enough to know this, but I think the fact that he’s so wildly succcessful in a business sense makes him feel validated, or at least feel like he’s ultimately not doing any harm by doing this. So I view it like a hobby of his that he feels like isn’t actually doing any harm. Furthermore, I suspect that if the business side of things were to undergo a steady decline and he could draw a line between that and his actions as GM, he’d probably actually hire a real GM and step back.
I had mistakenly believed that Jody Allen was Paul Allen’s daughter, not sister. Mea culpa.
And I’d forgotten that Gayle is Tom’s widow, not child. Again, mea culpa.
Or, more bluntly, he’s unwilling to run the football operations side of his business like an actual, modern NFL team, and apparently still believes that he can be successful running it the way he did when he was successful at it, 30+ years ago.
The only aspect of the team that’s suffering is on-field success. Clearly, that’s the least important element.
First and foremost, these teams are for-profit business enterprises, so as long as they make money that’s all that is required.
If that’s the metric you want to use, then every NFL team is undoubtedly successful. We only know the financial numbers for the Packers, as they’re the only publicly-owned team in the league (and, thus, are required to release their financial reports), but because the TV and streaming contract revenues, and much of the licensing revenues, are split evenly between the teams, it’s very likely that all of them – even the poorly-run ones – are still making great gobs of cash.
What persistent on-field futility can do is depress income streams which are directly profitable to each team: ticket sales for their home games (AIUI, a team gets 66% of the gate revenue for home games, with the remaining 34% going to the visitor), concession sales, the value of local radio contracts, local sponsorships, merchandise sales through the team’s own online store (if they operate one), etc. But, AIUI, that’s a fairly small slice of a team’s overall revenue.
In the case of Jones and the Cowboys, as mentioned earlier in the thread, what he has continued to be very good at is marketing the team, and leveraging things which directly put money into the team’s coffers, and that’s despite their continual failure to meet fans’ (and, probably, Jones’s) expectations on the field.
It’s not a metric I want, but I have an unclouded understanding of how much what I want matters. Absolutely nothing at all to all the people involved. My only influence is how much I watch and how much I spend on one team or another, and that moves the needle less than infinitismally.
But for the people in control, it’s the metric that matters. Keep that in mind when you see a team behaving in ways you don’t understand or appreciate. Your understanding and appreciation means absolutely nothing.
Exactly. He insists on being the GM when he does a really awful job of it, and since he’s the owner, nobody can fire him. That is absolutely meddling.
To use an admittedly clumsy analogy, he’s like a person who insists on doing their own car repairs despite having no mechanical skills and frequently making things worse. It’s their car, so for the most part they can do whatever they want with it, but it’s fair to criticize them for not taking it to a real mechanic. And if they are a hobbyist with a project car that’s fine, but if it’s their actual commuter vehicle they are taking on the road, that’s not cool at all.
Or, rather, how Jimmy Johnson was successful at it 30+ years ago and whose success Jones has been trying to replicate ever since.
But perhaps this is an argument over semantics. If the “meddlesome” owner is imprecise, how about “activist owner” or similar label for owners who meddle with the experts they hire (Davis, Snyder, Tepper) and/or eliminate the middlemen and explicitly give themselves the decision making role (currently only Jones).
Mike Brown of the Bengals used to be in the latter group as well and the Bungles got that name during the 20 year stretch when he was completely in charge. But, as if by magic, the team started doing better after 2011 when he finally started stepping back. They’re still arguably not well run but still noticeably and distinctly better than the 20 year period he was calling all the shots.
If the Netflix documentary is to be believed, Jones was behind many of the changes that made the NFL the behemoth that it is today. All of the owners are making significantly more money because of him.
Yes, as previous posts have mentioned, it depends on how one defines success.
If running a team well means profitability, Jones has done a terrific job. Possibly contributed more to the NFL than any other owner of the modern era.
But if it means on-field success and smooth front office, personnel, and coaching operations, he’s not been terribly good at it.
Another analogy, possibly also clumsy, would be that of a hospital CEO who is really good at running the business, but who for whatever reason (probably to satisfy his own ego) sometimes goes down to the OR and tells the surgeons how to perform the operation they are doing. No matter how good he is at the former, it doesn’t qualify him to do the latter.
It’s semantics I know, but it’s not meddling.
As GM, football operations are undoubtedly is concern. Being bad at it is bad, but it’s bad in a different (and more important) way. Your driveway mechanic analogy works because, while he has no skill at the work, he’s not standing over the shoulder of a professional and giving bad instructions and hiding tools. He’s not meddling with the repair of his car. He’s just repairing his car badly.
Now, you could say he’s meddling with the coaches if he’s telling them who to start, what plays to call, what the game plan should be, or messing with practice programs. But that’s not where is biggest issues are.
You’re not going to win an argument against everyone accusing Jerry of meddling, which goes far beyond this thread. (Just look up “Jerry Jones meddling” in Google to see how widespread of an opinion it is.)
The other thing that I think is escaping you is that this isn’t just something affecting Jerry himself.
Since you like the car analogy, I’m pretty sure that if ask the wife of the guy screwing up his car because he refuses to take it to a mechanic, she would absolutely say he’s meddling, regardless of whether or not his name is the only one on the car registration, because it’s negatively affecting her. That is what makes it meddling; when involving yourself in something that somebody else should be doing causes a problem for other people, it fits the definition, regardless of whether or not you have a legal right to do it.
Bad analogy. In this analogy the surgeons are the players. Jerry isn’t sitting on the bench holding the tablet and reviewing coverages with the QB.
Better analogy is the CEO also serving as the Chief Medical Officer. Which is a thing that happens in that industry (though rarely with more and more consolidation).
Yeah, because the internet at large is well known as an authority on such matters.
I know in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter, but this is the Dope. We do pedantry here.
More like the CEO, who happens to have been a small-town country doctor (Jones did play Div 1 college football), compelling his hospital to do certain treatments and other stuff because he’s got the power to mandate those things, even though they may not be the best for the patients or medical providers.
But the hospital doesn’t have bad outcomes to the point where the state will step in, and the place is somehow wildly profitable for reasons that have little to do with the actual doctoring going on, so the CEO doesn’t see a need to NOT interfere with his underlings and how they treat their patients.
I feel like if the Cowboys were somehow to hit a serious decline in profitability, Jerry’s smart enough to see the writing on the wall and would probably back off enough to get it back on track.
Also, the conspiratorial part of me feels like for business purposes, it might actually be better from a business perspective for the team to perpetually be break-even or better up to the point where they make it into the playoffs, so that there’s always suspense and drama surrounding the team and the various machinations that have to do with it. Because if you always are in the hunt, however marginally, people will stay loyal, be interested, and so forth, but if you have a stretch where you’re too good, people come to expect it and you get a lot of backlash when you don’t actually constantly perform at that level.
One reason Jerry has a hard time not meddling is because sometimes his coaches have indeed made - or would have made - disastrous decisions if he didn’t meddle. For instance (if my memory is right), Parcells once prioritized drafting Marcus Spears (a totally mid-quality lineman) over DeMarcus Ware, an exceptionally good pass rusher. Jerry reportedly overruled him and took Ware first. (The Cowboys did get both, but had Parcells taken Spears first, Ware may have been gone by the time of the Cowboys’ second pick.) Parcells also drafted pretty awfully at time, getting guys like Bobby Carpenter in the first round when there were many better players to be had. Then, Parcells also had horrible game-planning at times.
I hate Jerry as much as anyone else, but it’s hard to not be a backseat driver when you see your chauffeur driving towards a cliff.