Today marks the 25th anniversary of Jerry Jones purchasing the Dallas Cowboys. Back in 2010, Jones wrote for D Magazine about his dealings with prior owner Bum Bright. Even after the deal was announced publicly in 1989, as well as was the decision to fire Tom Landry and replace him with University of Miami head coach Jimmy Johnson, there were weeks of negotiations involving millions of dollars that had to be settled before it was finalized:
When we finally resolved the details, there was a figure in excess of $350,000 we couldn’t agree on. Bum said we should just flip a coin. I called—tails—and Bum flipped it. I lost.
When we later signed the final papers—and this was weeks after we’d made the announcement—he handed me an embossed coin, encased in rigid plastic so you couldn’t see one side. He told me that was the coin we’d flipped. “You’ll never know if that was a two-headed coin,” he said. People don’t believe me, but to this day I’ve never torn it apart to see if it was two-headed.
That night, after we signed the last paper, I went out to Texas Stadium and had them turn on the lights. I laid down on the star and had to pinch myself. That’s when it all seemed real.
At the NFL Combine this weekend, Jones expressed regret about the decision to jettison the longtime and beloved Coach Landry so quickly, saying that he perhaps should have “waited a year and just got my feet on the ground a little bit more and probably just gone with the staff that we had and then later made the ultimate change that I made.”
But where does that rank among the bad decisions that Jones has made during his tenure as owner?
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