“There is absolutely nothing, short of the health and goodwill of the people I care about, there’s nothing that means more to me than if I could get a Super Bowl,” Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said at the NFL combine back in 2019. “Nothing.”
A couple years later, Jones was asked if he would make a deal with the devil for a Super Bowl.
“I found that he’s not quite as responsive to one’s individual ask as you might think,” Jones said. “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.”
Earlier this season, Jones described winning a Super Bowl as the “absolute glory hole.”
If that is how Jones describes winning a Super Bowl, then I shudder to think how he would describe Dallas’s 48-32 loss to the Packers on Sunday. The final score doesn’t do the game justice. The Cowboys were embarrassed from the opening drive and were down 32 points in the fourth quarter.
Dallas allowed the most points in a playoff game in team history. Green Bay had 20 points before Cowboys receiver CeeDee Lamb had a catch. Packers quarterback Jordan Love finished one point off of a perfect passer rating versus Dallas’s vaunted defense. When Green Bay went up 27-0, the Packers had more interception return yards (64) than Prescott had passing yards to his own team (61), per ESPN Stats & Info.
“I don’t think anyone,” Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy said after the game, “saw this coming.”
Jones is the Cowboys owner, but he is also a Cowboys fan, and Cowboys fans are like Charlie Brown. They know that no matter how tempting the football looks, it will be ripped out from underneath them. But this Dallas team was one of the most convincing Lucys in years. The offense ranked fourth in points, the defense was perhaps the league’s most disruptive, and the rookie kicker set the franchise record for points in a season.
Cowboys fans bought in, hoping for something different. But instead, the Cowboys once again brought their worst right when everyone expected their best. Dallas has been associated with playoff disappointment for decades, but Sunday was its masterpiece. Now Jones has to figure out how to lead this team back to, uh, glory.
