2021 training camp press conference

Jerry says Cowboys ‘need to have a Charles Haley up here’ to win a Super Bowl

While ‘not comparing’ current Cowboys stars to past Super Bowl winners, the team owner did just that; Stephen Jones stressed coaching.

It’s a strange thing: at the very beginning, all anybody wants to talk about is the very end. The Dallas Cowboys opened their 2021 training camp in Oxnard with their annual press conference, and before a single player had stepped onto the practice field for even the first set of calisthenics, the assembled media members were grilling the team’s front office on the championship game that won’t be played for nearly seven months.

Specifically, the questions revolved around how the current squad plans to get there. And about what’s been missing from so many Cowboys teams over the past quarter-century, since the 1995 club brought the most recent Lombardi Trophy back to Dallas.

Owner Jerry Jones, always quick to relive Cowboys history even when speaking on the present day, resurrected the memories of several ghosts of Super Bowls past when he was asked what it would take to put the team back in the title game.

“We need to have a Charles Haley up here,” Jones said. “You follow me? Because we got him, and we started going to Super Bowls. But you say, ‘Well, Charles didn’t do it himself.’ Of course not. But he was a big, impactful player.”

Jones did not elaborate on if the Charles Haley type he was referring to is currently on the roster. Is it DeMarcus Lawrence? His pay grade suggests the team puts considerable stock in his skills. Is it Micah Parsons? The team clearly has high hopes for the rookie after selecting him in the first round of the draft. Was Jones subtly alluding to a defender on another team that the Cowboys might be eyeing in a trade? Was he talking about a defensive player at all?

Or was the 78-year-old Jones simply holding court with a collection of rapt reporters, throwing out more feel-good references to great names from the Cowboys’ past and tantalizing fans with the notion that the next Dallas dynasty is right around the corner? Because that’s certainly possible, too.

Here’s how he went on.

“I think we’ve got a combination right now. Seriously- and I’m not making comparisons; you can get in so much trouble doing that- but I think we’ve got a combination… of youth, players, talent, as well as we’ve got some solid, solid talented veteran players. When you look at our top 10, 11 paid guys, they’re guys that can make major contributions to this team. We had a core base like that in those championship years that made that core base, yet boy, we had some talented young guys come through. We’re starting to look like that when you look at team makeup. Now, I’m not comparing Troy [Aikman] and Dak [Prescott]. I’m not comparing Emmitt [Smith] and Zeke [Elliott]. I’m not doing that at all. And certainly I’m not comparing Michael [Irvin] with anybody we’ve got at all.”

He’s not saying. He’s just saying.

And he’s verbalizing what Cowboys fans have been hoping for since the original Triplets rode roughshod over the league. There have been glimpses of a Triplets 2.0 since those days. Romo, Murray, and Bryant briefly came close in 2014. Prescott, Elliott, and Bryant looked promising in 2017.

Jones maintains optimism about somebody in his locker room right now providing that boost for the rest of the squad.

“Do we dare think we could have one of those on this team? That would have that kind of leadership role? We may have it. It might be your quarterback.”

Chief operating officer Stephen Jones agrees.

“Well, that’s it,” he said, dovetailing off his father’s words. “I think you just hit on it. I think Dak’s rare. I think, obviously, when we stepped up and made him the highest-paid player in the league, [it was] for a reason. I think he’s got rare, rare traits. Leadership traits. Winning traits… He’s unique and I think you couple that with, as Jerry said, some optimism we have with some of our pass rushers, our offensive line, Zeke..”

But the younger Jones knows it’s also about coaching. His father spent a chunk of the press conference admitting that he had failed in not showing the proper “deference” to the meteoric success that Jimmy Johnson had had in his five years coaching the team. Barry Switzer won a Super Bowl, but with a roster that had been mostly Johnson’s. Every coach after has chased the franchise’s sixth title without success.

Stephen thinks current staff- head coach Mike McCarthy, in his second season with the organization, newly-hired defensive coordinator Dan Quinn, and offensive wunderkind Kellen Moore- could be the perfect complement to the roster’s obvious on-the-field talent.

“You pair that with the guy sitting next to me. He’s obviously been to four championship games, won a Super Bowl. The leadership [Coach McCarthy] brings to the table, I think, can make a huge difference. And then, of course, we brought in Dan Quinn, who was real close to winning one- got his team to the Super Bowl- so we’ve got people with pedigree here that I think can help us take the next step.”

So is it “a Charles Haley” that the team needs most? Is it a new set of Triplets? Is it Prescott? Is it coaching?

The easiest- and yet simultaneously hardest- answer is that it’s almost surely all of the above. It’s not just one thing, because it’s a million little things that all have to gel and come together in just the right way, in just the right sequence, and in just the right proportions. That magic alchemy is necessary for any NFL team to hoist the Super Bowl trophy.

But it’s not a formula or a documented recipe that can just be replicated. The Cowboys may know what they want the end result to be, but there are countless lists of ingredients that can be used and a wide variety of methods that can get them there.

Yes, it’s the very end that matters most. But it has to start at the very beginning.

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Emotional Jerry Jones opens Cowboys camp with stunning admission about Jimmy Johnson

“I should have had deference to something that was working,” Jones said of the 1994 episode that saw coach Jimmy Johnson leave the team.

The circus has come back to town. And the ringmaster was visibly emotional as the show got underway once again.

The Cowboys have re-assembled in Oxnard for training camp, with Wednesday’s opening press conference kicking off the proceedings before the first scheduled practice on Thursday morning. After 2020’s California trip was canceled by COVID-19, team owner Jerry Jones admitted that simply having the gang back together again for its 15th year at the River Ridge Playing Fields was enough to put him in a sentimental mood.

Over the course of the hourlong press conference in which he answered questions on everything from vaccination rates to his famously volatile relationship with the coach who brought him his first two trophies, the 78-year-old got noticeably choked up multiple times.

“Seriously, what you’re seeing is just how good it feels to be here,” Jones told reporters. “Doggone, just as much as I enjoy this stuff, I get to thinking, ‘Well, are you ever going to see that again? Are you ever going to be sitting up there talking to everybody again at the same time?’ I’m not going to apologize, but I am sensitive today and emotional about the whole show.”

It was a time for Jones to soak in some of the nostalgia surrounding the start of yet another football season and dust off a few of the memories that have come with having owned the Cowboys for over three decades, taking them from the league’s laughing stock to the most valuable sports franchise on the planet.

Winning three Super Bowls in four years shortly after taking the reins certainly helped create more than a few moments worth remembering. Jones recalled his first California training camp- then slightly east of Oxnard- shortly after purchasing the team.

“I remember coming out to Thousand Oaks, smelling that grass, being out where the great tradition that the Cowboys were for training camp, and it just… I just had to pinch myself to think that I got to be a part of that.”

Those were Jimmy Johnson’s earliest days as head coach in Dallas. Johnson will be enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in a few short weeks. Jones and the Cowboys will be present once again, as the team revisits its long rivalry with the Steelers in the accompanying exhibition game. The induction and the game were supposed to have happened last summer, before the pandemic and travel restrictions forced the league to postpone.

That it’s all come after so long a wait and so uncertain a time perhaps only adds to the emotion for Jones, who rolled unprompted into a remembrance about the shocking way their relationship ended when Johnson departed after the team’s second world title.

“Barry Switzer came in the office. And Jimmy had just left,” Jones shared, referring to the 1994 offseason. “Barry came down from Norman, Oklahoma, to talk about getting the job. And he comes in, and he said, ‘Where’s Jimmy?’ Now, Barry had coached us both. He said, ‘Where’s Jimmy?’ I said, ‘Jimmy’s gone.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s not right. Get him. Get him in here. Where’s Jimmy?’ I said, ‘Barry, Jimmy’s gone. We’re sitting here talking about you being the coach.’ I said, ‘What in the world are you so anxious to talk to Jimmy about?’ He said, ‘I just wanted to get both you little [expletive] on this couch and ask you both how could you [expletive] this up.’ That was Switzer.”

It’s a question most fans many around the football world asked at the time and in the years since. Switzer went on to win a Super Bowl of his own, but Johnson’s exit was the beginning of a long, slow, painful fade for the dynasty.

Jones knows it. And on Wednesday, he admitted his negligence in allowing it all to fall apart.

“I just think of those great times. And Jimmy’s a great coach. Great coach. Ridiculous that–,” Jones said before stopping himself and restarting. “My role here, it was my job to keep it together. It was my job. I should have had deference to something that was working good. So those are the things that come to my mind. We had a great run of it. He’s a great coach, and I’m proud to have him as a friend, and proud to have had the times that we had. We just had a great experience.”

That last sentence was a struggle for Jones to get out, choking up audibly as he did. Twenty-seven years after Switzer’s question, though, Jones still has no answer.

“I’ve never been able to know why I [expletive] it up,” Jones said. “Not just that, but anything else. No, I can’t answer those questions.”

Jones and Johnson still haven’t publicly made up, although Jones has softened in recent comments about his former coach and onetime college teammate. One of the most-anticipated storylines of the upcoming Hall of Fame ceremonies will be a possible reconciliation between the two.

And then talk will turn, as it always does, to Johnson’s inclusion in the Cowboys Ring of Honor. It’s an honor that Jones has not yet bestowed on Johnson, with many seeing the coach’s enshrinement in Canton as the final obstacle.

But Jones, ever the showman, is more than happy to prolong the drama and the leave that question unanswered, too, for the moment.

“You know, I don’t want to do anything that takes away from this year,” Jones said of Johnson. “He’ll have a year- provided everything goes good- he’ll have a year that we also honor his Hall of Fame, and it will be this year.”

Call it a cliffhanger of sorts, something perhaps for the assembled media to hound Jones about when they all reconvene in Oxnard in July 2022.

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