Cowboys’ Record-Breaking Valuation Can’t Buy Them a Super Bowl

Jerry Jones could have made life easier for Dallas fans, Mike McCarthy, as well as CeeDee Lamb, Dak Prescott and Micah Parsons, but he has chosen not to.

Jones's franchise is now valued at more than $10 billion. / Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports

Congratulations to the Dallas Cowboys for being the first sporting franchise to top $10 billion in worth, according to a new list compiled by the sports business entity Sportico. Surely, Forbes, Haute Living and the duPont REGISTRY are next in doling out accolades. 

One of the true pleasures of news such as this is realizing that money cannot buy you happiness, or, in this case, competence. The Cowboys have essentially created a New Orleans Saints-like financial hell hole for themselves to lie in. They have more money than the islands of Fiji and Barbados combined but could only, hilariously, manage to spend $16.5 million in free agency during a critical offseason because of previous contractual entanglements and the perpetual kicking of their financial woes down the road like a guest on the Dave Ramsey show. Imagine being able to purchase an original Da Vinci and not Alexander Mattison. Like the Joker tells Batman in The Dark Knight, “You have nothing to do with all your strength.” 

For reference, the Carolina Panthers spent $259.9 million this offseason, while the New York Giants, the next closest team in the NFC East, spent $94.7 million. The Cowboys spent less than half of the money that the second-lowest-spending team in the NFL opted to use on free agents. (That team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, invested their money on re-signing Baker Mayfield, Tristan Wirfs, Mike Evans and Antoine Winfield Jr.)

The Philadelphia Eagles have managed to fit a top-of-the-market quarterback, two top-of-the-market wide receivers and a top-of-the-market running back all in a pair of offseasons. They have also been to a Super Bowl since "Exhale (Shoop, Shoop)" was the No. 1 hit in the country. Life comes at you fast, no? 

Some of this is, I understand, because they are trying to figure out how to pay CeeDee Lamb, Dak Prescott and Micah Parsons. To add to the macabre humor of it all, Prescott is likely seeing the finish line when it comes to free agency and knows he could probably make way more money on the open market (or force Dallas to pay more). For Parsons, every defensive player contract that leapfrogs the one signed by Nick Bosa increases his asking price. Their indecision and commitment to some old-west style spit-handshake swagger are costing them interest by the second. 

Of course, the money that Jones can spend this year just because he has it—the $14 billion not dependent on the NFL’s salary cap structure—remains tied up elsewhere as well. Mostly by indifference, which is harder to explain given the team’s new valuation. What do we mean by this? For example, much of Jones’s coaching staff is on panic-inducing one year contracts, which neither inspire confidence in the people operating under those deals, nor the confidence in the players tasked with listening to those coaches or prospective draft picks and free agents searching for some modicum of stability. 

Jones could have taken that money and extended head coach Mike McCarthy along with all of his assistants for one additional season … but chose not to. He could have taken that money and paid the remainder of their contracts, fired them, hired Bill Belichick and a new staff … and chose not to. He could have taken that money and invested in an image consultant who could have explained to him that it’s not cute or glitzy or a show of power to make players such as Lamb wait until the 11th hour to sign their contracts after an acrimonious holdout. That act is so incredibly tired and so thankfully rooted in the league’s more oppressive “inmates running the prison” past. He chose not to do that, either. 

Jones could have given the fan base something to show up for during training camp, which seemed to be sparsely attended and, according to one report, essentially protested by Cowboys fans sick of the team’s disregard for common sense practices. He chose not to. 

That’s the other element of this new valuation that is so fascinating. It really only matters to a very small handful of people, a kind of you-know-what-measuring contest for a class of people so distant from our reality that we more regularly come into contact with creatures from outer space. Cowboys fans are like the recently laid off at a mega corporation touting its strong performance on the stock market after what they’ll term in a press release as “strategic restructuring.”

If something does get accomplished through this news, I hope it’s the releasing of the truth—that very little of it is being spent directly on making life as a Cowboys fan better. Sure, there are plenty of fancy hotels to go to in Frisco, Texas. There will be more places to buy jerseys and eat $100 steaks. There will be endless dolled-up sinkholes for you to toss money into. But that’s as far as it goes. Once it leaves your hand, its only true value is to help someone else explain how valuable they are with no burden to prove it.

Editors’ note, Aug. 15 at 12:10 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to clarify the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ offseason spending.