Ultimately, we need to remind ourselves again and again that a tie between the Cowboys and Packers on Sunday night—a tie!—did not in any meaningful way change the course of Jerry Jones’s life. The Cowboys’ owner showed up for the part of the contest that mattered to him: a real hardball interview with the network he partially has in a headlock as an NFL owner dangling television rights, featuring the coach that he used to pay millions of dollars asking questions. A regular Geraldo Rivera vs. Charles Manson performance if I’ve ever seen one.
His play-acting in the owners’ box—a truly Vince McMahon–like series of head shaking and hand flailing and clapping and waving—was the capper on a night in which no one meaningfully challenged the idea that he let one of the NFL’s great players, Micah Parsons, leave not because he is some renegade robber baron, but because of a series of devastating financial decisions he made with his own personal play team that left him uninterested in paying a talented edge rusher.
