How old is Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys?
By Staff
How old is Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys?
For the last 30 years, the image of Jerry Jones has been as synonymous with the Dallas Cowboys as the star on their helmet. At some point, the oil baron turned NFL czar blurred the lines so much that the Cowboys ceased to be America’s Team and became Jerry’s Team.
When you think of the Cowboys, you think of Aikman, Smith, Landry, and Jerry Jones.
That’s exactly how Jones wanted to manipulate how history remembered him when he tinkered with the Cowboys 90s dynasty. He destroyed something beautiful and perfect to ensure that the man in the owner’s box was always more important than the star at midfield.
It’s a hard truth that Jones recently revisited with rather shocking honesty and reflection.
“I’ve never been able to know why I f–ked it up,” Jones said at an emotional press conference this week, in reference to a question about the breakup of the Jimmy Johnson-led Cowboys.
How old is Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys?
As of 2021, Jones is 78 years old and will turn 79 in October.
He purchased the Dallas Cowboys back in 1989 when he was only 46 for a poultry $140 million. The new Cowboys stadium, opened in 2009 and widely known as ‘JerryDome’, cost $1.3 billion to construct — nearly 10 times as much as Jones paid for the Cowboys when he originally purchased them.
Jerry Jones press conference: Was Jerry Jones crying over his past mistakes?
In his three decades of owning the Dallas Cowboys, we’ve rarely seen any emotion from Jones other than anger or unabashed joy. There really hasn’t been any in-between, as he’s either ecstatic over a huge win or fuming because his team can’t get back to its glory days of the 90s.
Those days of the 90s Cowboys is why Jones recently got so emotional — surprisingly so.
Jones seemingly took the blame for breaking up the Jimmy Johnson Cowboys that had won back-to-back Super Bowls during the 1992 and 1993 seasons. It’s one of the most iconic tragedies in football, as the Cowboys had just reached the peak of their dynastical powers when a struggle between two tyrannical egos destroyed the whole thing.
Johnson had carefully crafted the Cowboys roster through the draft and tough decisions, oftentimes butting heads with Jones over who to pay and how much to pay them. When Jones saw Johnson getting the lion’s share of the credit, he began trying to hamfistedly wrestle some of it away for himself.
The end result was Jones exacting ultimate power over Johnson and shockingly firing him after the 1993 Super Bowl win. It’s widely believed that had Jones (and Johnson, who deserves blame as well) had just swallowed his pride the Cowboys could have won as many as five Super Bowls.
The NFC destroyed the AFC in the next three Super Bowls after Johnson’s firing, including a Super Bowl XXX win by the Cowboys. It’s a fascinating what-if in football history and one that Jones has clearly not stopped thinking about over the last 28 years.