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Big D, as in decay - PART 2
By Paul Attner
The Sporting News

In some ways, these are circumstances that Jerry Jones relishes. The current state of the Cowboys allows him to prove, once and forever, that he and his personnel staff can create a champion.

The three Super Bowl winners in the 1990s were, depending on who is talking, born from a joint venture between Jones and Jimmy Johnson; Johnson's accomplishment alone, with Jones' rubber-stamp approval; or a product of Jones' genius, with Johnson helping on the specifics. But Jones still believes he never has received the credit he deserves for building those championship teams.

Now, with the retirement of Aikman, the only players from the Johnson-Jones era are Smith, Woodson and Mark Stepnoski, who returned to the Cowboys in 1999 after four years with Houston/Tennessee. Johnson is long gone, cruising on his boat in south Florida. If the Cowboys are to rise again, it will be with Jones' players and with Jones' draft acumen.

"It's hard to be a real difference maker if you don't have a down time," he said near the end of a long interview in his office at the Cowboys' complex. "If you don't have someone tell you that you are in a crisis, how can you step up and do something really good with your team? I see this as nothing more than an opportunity to step up and knock the ball out of the park."

That is what Banks and Carter represent to him -- opportunities for home runs, opportunities to show the rest of the league he is a bit smarter and craftier. Singles are productive, but anyone can get to first base. Jones thrives on the big deal or the unique decision that few others would dare consider, much less execute. That's the mentality he has used to build the Cowboys from near bankruptcy to a $713 million empire that leads the NFL in souvenir sales and maverick marketing. But now it is a mentality that is digging his team into deep problems.

"I am a firm believer that you have to do some inordinate things to separate yourself and win more games than the rest of the teams," he says. "You can't do it playing safe and laying up. I knew the risk I was taking when I drafted Quincy. I have always dealt with the risks and the criticism, and more times than not, I have been right."

This pro football thing has been easy for him, and that has lulled him into a dangerous sense of false security. He took over the franchise just in time to select Aikman as the first player in the 1989 draft. Then the genius of the Herschel Walker trade with the Vikings later in 1989 gave him extra draft choices that allowed the club to expedite the upgrading of its roster. The Cowboys were 1-15 in 1989; three years later, they had won a Super Bowl. It was a dazzling accomplishment.

But now there is no Herschel Walker to trade, no Troy Aikman on the roster. So he pushes and reaches, trying to force what isn't there, trying to re-create the past and its magic.

Both Jones and his son, Stephen, the Cowboys' salary-cap guru and director of player personnel, pledge they are committed to upgrading through the draft. They say the days of big spending on free agents are over, even though next year the franchise will be a stunning $20 million or more under the cap, an enormous sum that gives the Cowboys incredible flexibility. Still, they say they are out of the rent-a-star business.

This year, with $23 million of their $67 million cap tied up in dead money that mostly went to paying off Aikman and Deion Sanders, they really have no other choice. They have one of the lowest actual payrolls in the league, and little room to bring in even bargain free agents.

"Those young players that we drafted the last few years have to start playing for us and develop right now," says Stephen Jones. "In my opinion, we will be much better than people think this year because of these young guys."

Forget it. The majority of these young prospects aren't very talented or experienced. The Cowboys have no players left from the 1995 and 1996 drafts and only two from 1997 (Coakley and tight end David LaFleur); those drafts should be the foundation of the current roster. Instead, they have to rely on the 1998, 1999 and 2000 drafts -- and those have produced only four potential quality players: offensive tackles Solomon Page and Flozell Adams and defensive ends Greg Ellis and Ebenezer Ekuban. That's it. Even the Cowboys are hard-pressed to name any more. Still, they likely will start nine players this season from the past three drafts. And probably no more than nine players on their opening day roster will have more than five years of experience.

Of the Cowboys' five picks in the 2000 draft, three were defensive backs. One of the three, Mario Edwards, is projected to start at cornerback; the other two are expected to be main backups. None is close to being a top-flight player. "To me," says Theismann, "the key to the Cowboys' success will be that draft and those DBs. If you are retooling one side of the ball and an entire class collapses, it sets you back three to four years."

To correct this drafting nightmare, the wise move would be to hire an esteemed personnel director and get out of his way. But Jones won't hear of it. "If I thought there was a (talent) guru in the world who could do it far better than what we are doing, he would work for the Cowboys," he says. "I have never met him."

When Troy Aikman became an ex-Cowboy this past spring, he tried to warn Jerry and Stephen Jones. "The absolute worst thing that could happen to this club would be to try to salvage another year or two and then have a 6-10 or 8-8 season," Aikman said. He later told Baldinger: "The best thing that can happen is that they are at the bottom of the heap. Maybe that will get them to take off the rose-colored glasses and be realistic about what they have."

Ironically, Aikman is one of the major reasons the Cowboys are in this current mess. Jones' obsession with winning Super Bowls as long as he had Aikman clouded his personnel judgments, and he put too much faith in the health of his franchise quarterback.

Jones was convinced that Aikman could play at a high level until at least 2004. So his thought process went like this: If we can surround Troy with sufficient talent, we can win more rings -- and the heck with a deteriorating defense. The Cowboys kept signing free agents to supplement Aikman's offense. And in order to come up with money to pay these players -- and to extend contracts of his core offensive stars -- Jones often traded away first-round draft picks, substantially reducing the pool of young, developing stars he now desperately needs.

Although not one football expert thought the Cowboys were Super Bowl material a year ago, Jones was so sure he could make another title run that he executed the Galloway trade, surrendering his 2000 and 2001 No. 1 picks. Jones' rationale: Galloway would give Aikman a second speed receiver to spread the field and make the offense nearly unstoppable. Hadn't the Rams showed how a high-powered offense could win a Super Bowl?

It was a devastating miscalculation. Aikman entered the 2000 season with a long history of concussions and a bad back. His future was risky, at best. Jones attributed Aikman's decline not to his physical problems but to a philosophical clash with Chan Gailey, who coached the Cowboys in 1998 and 1999 and installed a passing offense that Aikman didn't like. So Jones fired Gailey, promoted Campo from defensive coordinator to head coach and reinstalled Norv Turner's old vertical offense, which the team used in its three championship seasons.

Aikman didn't last a game without injury problems. In the opener against the Eagles, he suffered a concussion in the first half. Galloway wrecked a knee in the fourth period, putting him out for the season. The Cowboys lost, 41-14. "We never recovered from that defeat," says Jones. Aikman would miss two games because of the concussion, then almost two more because of back spasms. Against the Redskins December 10, he left in the first quarter with the 10th concussion of his career. It would be his final NFL appearance.

"Before last season, I didn't view Troy's concussion situation as career ending," says Jones. "His back was more of a concern, quite frankly. But to be sitting here a year later without Troy frankly is a stunning turn of events."

Not to everyone. "Hoping to get two years from Troy would have been optimistic," says Theismann. "Once you develop a history of concussions, I don't think you fully recover. I admire Jerry for taking a shot at trying to win it all. He felt if he could get into the playoffs, why couldn't he win the Super Bowl, too?"

But Baldinger says: "How could he possibly look at his defensive personnel and think that was a championship defense? It was one of the worst defenses I have seen in the league in years. Three guys rushed for 200 yards each against them. I mean, how bad is bad?"

Jones is sitting in his office, hearing all this and getting, he admits, a bit defensive. A no-alcohol, no-sweets diet has helped him lose 37 pounds, and he is fighting back. "I have been bitten by injuries," he says.

"Jay Novacek. Michael Irvin. Troy Aikman. Charles Haley. That's what went wrong. You can say, 'Jerry, you are hanging onto their skills when their skills are not there.' I disagree. Aikman's skills were still there. And you can say, 'Jerry, don't you want the Galloway deal back?' No. We didn't want to draft a receiver and wait two to three years for him to develop, not with the window we had with Troy. Galloway was ready. Those are the risks you take. We won a Super Bowl by getting Deion Sanders. That's called nailing it. But sometimes, it doesn't work."

He pauses. "Considering the money I have spent on players, the fact we haven't won a Super Bowl the last four or five years is pretty devastating. In hindsight, I probably made a mistake. I should have said to our coaches: Play the players we are drafting, play them. The years I paid out $30-$40 million in bonuses, I would have been a lot better off playing these young guys. We would have looked a lot better in how we evaluate personnel."

If those personnel evaluations prove to be as flawed as they seem, then forget all this brave talk about rebounding through the draft. Another year of embarrassing losses and Jones will become impatient. He will start spending money again, using his monstrous cap surplus on defensive free agents and a quarterback. Without a string of solid drafts, this is the only avenue remaining.

Yet amid all this uncertainty, Cowboys executives talk as if it won't be that difficult to construct another contender. After all, in the early 1990s, they won championships with a young team. Why is this different? Besides, NFL parity makes a quick fix very feasible. "Everyone should be 8-8," says Jones. "That's the minimum you should be able to do every season. How soon we get back to Super Bowl contention will depend on how we do at quarterback."

Jones knows there is pressure on him to get it right again. He wants a new 100,000-seat stadium complex, but Cowboys fans are notoriously fickle, and if the team keeps losing, they won't even fill Texas Stadium. They'll come this season to watch Smith make his run at breaking Walter Payton's NFL career rushing record -- he needs 1,561 yards -- but the last of the Triplets can't carry the Cowboys forever.

"It's ugly right now," Smith said when Aikman was waived. Just think what it'll be like in the future.