Congratulations to the Dallas Cowboys for becoming the first sports team to surpass $10 billion in assets, according to a new list compiled by sports business organization Sportico. No doubt Forbes, Haute Living and DuPont Registry will be next in line to offer their accolades.
One of the real joys of news like this is the realization that money doesn’t buy happiness, or in this case, ability. The Cowboys have created a hell of a financial mess for themselves, much like the New Orleans Saints. They have more money than the Fiji Islands and Barbados combined, but ludicrously, they were only able to spend $16.5 million in free agency during a crucial offseason because of previous contractual entanglements and because they kept putting off financial difficulties like a guest on the Dave Ramsey Show. Imagine being able to buy an original Da Vinci instead of an Alexander Mathison. As the Joker says to Batman in The Dark Knight, “All your powers are nothing.”
For comparison, the Carolina Panthers spent $259.9 million this offseason, compared to the next-highest NFC East team, the New York Giants, who spent $94.7 million. The Cowboys spent less than half of what the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the NFL’s second-cheapest team, spent in free agency.
The Philadelphia Eagles have managed to assemble a top-tier quarterback, two top-tier wide receivers and a top-tier running back in the last two offseasons, and they’ve also been to the Super Bowl since “Exhale (Shoop, Shoop)” became a No. 1 hit in the nation. Life flies.
I understand that part of the reason is that they’re trying to figure out how to pay CeeDee Lamb, Dak Prescott and Micah Parsons. What makes all this even more eerie and comical is that Prescott sees the free agency finish line and knows he can probably make more (or get Dallas to pay him more) on the open market. For Parsons, his asking price goes up with every defensive player’s contract that leapfrogs the one Nick Bosa signed. Their indecisiveness and insistence on Wild West-style spitting handshakes is making them less interesting by the second.
Of course, the money Jones has available this year — $14 billion that doesn’t depend on the NFL’s salary-cap structure — remains tied up elsewhere. Most of it is out of apathy, but it’s hard to explain given the team’s new valuation. How does this mean? For example, much of Jones’ coaching staff is on panic-inducing one-year contracts that don’t generate trust in the people working under those contracts, nor in the players tasked with listening to the coaches, or in the draft prospects and free agents who are looking for some stability.
Jones could have used that money to extend the contracts of head coach Mike McCarthy and all his assistants for another season, but he didn’t. He could have used that money to pay out the rest of their contracts, fire them, and hire Bill Belichick and a new staff, but he didn’t. He could have used that money to invest in an image consultant to explain that having a player like Lamb wait until the last minute to sign a contract after bitter resistance isn’t cute or flashy or a show of power. That would be incredibly hackneyed and thankfully rooted in the league’s more repressive, “inmates running the prisons” past. He chose not to do that either.
Jones could have given fans a reason to show up during training camp — which was sparsely attended and, according to one report, essentially protested by Cowboys fans fed up with the team’s disregard for common sense practices — but he chose not to.
Here’s another very interesting element of this new assessment: it really only concerns a very small minority of people, a kind of “you see, measuring contest” for a class of people so removed from reality that we have more contact with extraterrestrial creatures. Cowboys fans are like the recently laid off people at a megacorporation that boasts of a booming stock market performance after what they would call a “strategic restructuring” in their press releases.
If this news accomplishes anything, I hope it is the publication of a truth: that very little of it goes directly to making life better as a Cowboys fan. Of course, Frisco, Texas, has plenty of fancy hotels. There are plenty more places to buy jerseys and eat $100 steaks. There are countless fancy sinkholes to throw money into. But that’s it. Once the money leaves your hands, its only real value is that it helps someone else explain how valuable they are, without the burden of proof.
