“We always got something going. People follow us year ’round. The owner every now and then gets in the paper. It just adds to the interest, all of it. People love that.”
Yes, Jerry Jones has gotten “in the paper” again, just for opening his mouth. And love it or not, his latest quote is sure to stir up the football world for a news cycle or two.
The Cowboys owner spoke with Peter King recently about the rising popularity of the sport and the astronomical price tag for an NFL franchise. The comments come in the midst of an effort to sell the Denver Broncos for what is expected to be over $4 billion.
“Amazing,” King writes in this week’s Football Morning in America column, “especially considering that when Forbes did its annual valuation of franchises this year, the Broncos were 10th. So if the Broncos are 10th and worth $4.5 billion, what are the rolling-in-dough Cowboys worth?”
Despite Forbes putting the number at $6.5 billion and a noted NFL business consultant saying the 79-year-old could likely get $8 billion or more if he tried to sell the team, Jones himself had a different asking price in mind.
“More than $10 billion,” he told King.
But don’t start that GoFundMe campaign quite yet.
“Let me make this very clear,” Jones said. “I’ll say it definitively. I will never do it. I will never sell the Cowboys. Ever.”
The Cowboys have certainly been the investment of a lifetime for the former oilman, who paid a now-paltry $140 million for the club- and got Texas Stadium thrown in- back in 1989.
Of course, the team was the worst in the league then. The Cowboys were losing $1 million a month, King points out. Chiefs owner and AFL icon Lamar Hunt called the purchase “the greatest risk I’ve ever seen an owner take.”
Now the Cowboys are the most valuable sports franchise on the planet. But the numbers feel like funny money to most normal humans. At a certain point, there are simply too many zeroes for the dollar amounts to really mean much.
So even if his estimate of $10 billion is a smidge high, think of Jones’s ROI this way.
That’s like buying a vintage pair of sneakers for $140, and then being able to sell them later… for $10,000.
Mathematically speaking, that’s precisely what Jones has done with the Cowboys.
But it’s not just the Cowboys, as the Broncos current bidding war proves. The Carolina Panthers- fairly far down in the hierarchy of storied pro football empires- were sold to new owners in 2018; the price tag was $2.275 billion. Of the six teams to change hands in the past 15 years, all brought in over $750 million, making what Jones paid for the sport’s flagship franchise look like a garage sale find.
King attributes the soaring values to several things, including longstanding labor pacts that have reliably kept the product on the field, the outrageous media-rights deals that have created a feeding frenzy when it comes to broadcasting games, and the development of offseason occurrences like the combine and the draft into bonafide events that have turned the NFL into a year-round moneymaking machine, managing to capture fans’ attention even when nothing is happening.
And no one knows that- or continues to drive it- quite like Jones.
Again, as he himself said, “We always got something going. People follow us year ’round. The owner every now and then gets in the paper. It just adds to the interest, all of it. People love that.”
The Broncos may be the team for sale right now. But with his latest quote, look for Jones and the Cowboys to suddenly be the topic of conversation, as pundits debate what America’s Team is truly worth, and someone, somewhere maybe puts his own name in the news by offering $11 billion for the Cowboys, just to see if Jones would really say no.
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