FROM THE ARCHIVES: Sept. 28, 2015. The following are excerpts from a SportsBusiness Journal profile of Stephen Jones.
Stephen raised his eyebrows when asked if his father had taken a step back at age 72, as some have speculated.
“Everyone wants to say Stephen is taking over the team now,” said Jones, the Cowboys’ chief operating officer and eldest of Jerry and Gene Jones’ three children, all of whom hold senior management positions and ownership stakes in the team. “That’s just not true. Nothing has changed. Obviously, he trusts me a lot more today than when I was 25 years old and trying to learn from the general manager of the stadium, the head accounting guy, the football coach and the marketing guy.
“Today, does he trust me almost implicitly? Of course he does. … But, at the end of the day, has anything changed? He makes the final decision. There’s one boss.”
Jerry likes to say that the Cowboys’ organizational chart is drawn with soft, blurred lines because it encourages the franchise to remain entrepreneurial. But you can’t help wondering whether it’s also set up that way because it spares him the perils of giving one of his offspring clear authority over the others.
Fortunately for Jones, the three of them have carved their own corners of the operation over the years. …
Stephen not only works at his father’s right hand on the football side, as COO he also is his clear No. 2 across all other functions of ownership. As much as Jerry carps that he would like “the whole crew” at his side during NFL owners’ meetings, it is Stephen who joins him when league protocol limits each club to two representatives. Stephen is one of two owners joining a mix of team presidents, general managers and coaches on the NFL’s nine-member competition committee.
In a league steeped in family tradition, it is natural to contemplate the impact as each franchise nears its window of generational exchange, and perhaps never more so than in the case of the Cowboys, who under Jerry Jones have been both trailblazer and outlier.
While he may take a gentler approach than his father — “more reasonable” is the way several described it — conversations exploring league matters hint that though his appetite for a fight may not be as voracious as his father’s, his philosophy is not far afield.
“It’s easy to say we all need to be team players when it’s not going in your eyes,” Stephen said. “But the second something we’re voting on cuts into somebody in a way that’s not good for that particular team, but might be good for 25 others, you’re going to hear them squeal. And they’re not going to be team players and they’re not going to vote for it. They’re going to be against it. And I respect that.
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Stephen Jones (right) has been at his father’s side since Jerry bought the team in 1989.
Photo by: DALLAS COWBOYS
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“I can’t stand the people who say ‘Well, I’m a league guy,’ because they’re not. Everybody is going to vote in the best interest of their club. And then that’s the art of the deal for [Commissioner Roger Goodell] and his staff. How do they concoct a deal that you can get 25 people to vote for.”
Stephen is the only one of the three siblings who was likely to join their father in the family business had it remained oil and gas. Before he took off to chase oil wells in the 1970s, Jerry was his father’s second as executive vice president of the family’s insurance business, a position he stepped into when he graduated from Arkansas, where he co-captained the school’s national championship football team in 1964.
He married and had his first son while he was still in school. The boy aspired to a similar path as his father: To play football at Arkansas, and then graduate to the family business. Jerry encouraged it.
“It was more than father and son,” Stephen said. “We were friends. Did everything together. His vision was: You and I are going to work together one day. And that’s what I wanted, too.”
They had no idea that it would be atop the most valuable franchise in American sports.
— Bill King
