Today's P.T. Barnum-Jerry Jones

 August 9, 2025- Saturday 

P.T. Barnum considered himself a showman. He promoted hoaxes and oddities of life all designed to make a dollar. He was successful at what he did. He also was quite the philanthropist and a good businessman.  He is attributed for the quote, “a sucker is born every minute.” It is very debatable if he actually said that or not, but he was a known showman and he knew the value of publicity and staying in the public’s eye. 

We have a present-day P.T. Barnum in our midst.  He is the owner and general manager of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones.  Jones took the National Football League by storm in the 1980’s and immediately fired the icon of high class and successful coaching, Tom Landry. There are people today who were once fans of the Dallas Cowboys who ceased being a fan of the team that day. Jerry Jones felt he needed his own man in the position, but he also needed to make a big splash in the media, so he fired Tom Landry and hired University of Miami football coach Jimmy Johnson. 

Jones and Johnson had played football together at the University of Arkansas, but Jones knew that Jimmy Johnson could put together a championship football team. That is what Jimmy Johnson did. After Johnson conned the Minnesota Vikings into a ridiculous trade for Herschel Walker, the Cowboys went into the draft and began to buy all the players they needed to make a championship run. They did have a run of Super Bowl Championships. 

Then the egos clashed between Johnson and Jones and everything changed. No more ridiculous trades. An NFL salary cap was instituted. Jimmy Johson left the Cowboys and went to the Miami Dolphins where he did make the playoffs one year but, with a salary cap in place, Johnson never saw another NFL Championship Game. Meanwhile, Jerry Jones started his run of coaches and now thirty years of play without an NFL National Conference Championship game. The Cowboys have had some good players but mediocre outcomes for now thirty years. Jones has been through many coaches because none have been able to get a team close to the Super Bowl. After thirty years of failure, Jerry Jones is still the general manager of the team. No other general manager in football has had thirty years of failure and maintained their job.  

This is where our modern-day P.T. Barnum comes into play. Jones does something every August to get the Dallas Cowboys into the media attention every day. If we go back and look at the training camps periods of the last several years, there is always some type of conflict that keeps the Dallas Cowboys in the news. We have no idea what is going on in Los Angeles, but everyone knows that Jerry Jones is not working to sign Micah Parsons, the All-Pro defensive end, to a long-term contract. This is where Jones works to keep the Cowboys in the media’s eye, even though he has put together yet another mediocre team.  

The media goes for it every year. They give Jerry Jones all the free publicity he would ever want, and he maintains a presence on all the television sports shows. That is his goal. Jones is not that interested in keeping players happy. He is not that interested in championships anymore as evidenced by the thirty years of mediocrity. He is interested in the attention however and he is interested in keeping a losing organization in the football conversations. Jones has been successful in conning the media and fans into thinking the Dallas Cowboys have a chance to play in the Super Bowl in 2026.  

The Dallas Cowboys are the only team in the NFL to have not played in a conference championship game in thirty years. It seems there needs to be a little more time spent on working on the talent and x’s and o’s of football and a lot less time on publicity.