The Dallas Cowboys Are Sinking Once Again. Will Jerry Jones Learn Anything From It?

_{Stop treating the team as an entertainment vehicle above all else.}

It's not that Jerry Jones doesn't want to be a true football guy, or that he doesn't care about football. He really does, and he has had his moments. But owners are businessmen more than they're football guys, and Jones is as invested in the bottom line as he is in the final record - or more so.

One example: As ESPN's Kalyn Kahler reported in October, Cowboys fans can walk through the team's facility while players are in meetings and getting treatment, and coaches are installing game plans, for $40 a pop. There are players and coaches who have bristled against it, but as Jones recently said while insisting that he has never heard one complaint from anybody, "the most important thing is it wouldn't make any difference. Period. Because overall, they're swimming against the stream."

From a business standpoint, Jones' team is remarkably successful. But from a football standpoint? It's hard to buy in when clown shows are the norm.

"We want to have our own space where we can talk, but it's either media or fans all day," one former player said. "You never get a break. It'd be one thing if they did the tours like one day a week, but it's every day."

"It's like you're in a zoo and kids are going to see a lion, former safety Jayron Kearse told Kahler. "That's not a reason why we didn't get over that hump. But I just don't think that really equates to winning."

For Jones, it's now more about market share than anything, and this is another area in which he has been very successful. You can't turn on a sports talk show on radio or television for five minutes without someone asking, "What's wrong with the Cowboys?" for the 53rd straight day. It's a leader on most of those shows (and most of these websites, to be brutally honest), because it clicks.

But it has nothing to do with football, and it can take away from those efforts to turn things in a more relevant direction on the field.

_{Name Will McClay the general manager, and make it a real promotion.}

Jerry Jones and Stephen Jones are not the primary reasons the Cowboys have been able to put a mostly competitive product on the field over the last few seasons. That praise should go to Vice President of Player Personnel Will McClay, a name many Cowboys fans don't even know because the organization wants the sun to shine on the same two Joneses all the time.

But McClay, is one of the NFL's most respected personnel people, and has been with the organization since 2002, McClay did it the old-fashioned way, working his way up from a scouting role to as much as a shot-caller as anybody not named Jones is allowed to be in that particular building. Over the last few years, most of the best players on this roster have McClay's stamp on them to a greater or lesser degree.

McClay's biography on the Cowboys' own website lists the 2014 draft as the first in which McClay had a primary role, and there's been some serious star power ever since. If you talk to people in and around the league, they'll tell you that it's McClay, and how he runs his evaluation staff, who you have to thank more than anybody in the top offices for the talent the team has had over the last decade.

So, it's time for McClay to have his own top office. Of course Jerry wants to be the de facto general manager, but he's known better at times. When he bought the team in 1989, he replaced Tom Landry with Jimmy Johnson. He then let Johnson use his own talent evaluation and experience with college prospects as Miami's wildly successful head coach to drive the roster to three Super Bowl wins from 1992-1995. And after years of middling results after Jones got tired of Johnson getting his due credit, Jones hired Bill Parcells to buy the groceries in 2003. Parcells never won a Super Bowl in Big D, but he did foster a competitive environment, and more of that is needed.

Put simply, a football person needs to be in charge, and McClay is by far the best football person in the building. His authority should match his responsibility.

_{Let the new GM hire the head coach.}

Mike McCarthy was a splashy hire because he once won a Super Bowl in Green Bay with prime Aaron Rodgers as his quarterback, but McCarthy has also been one of the most limited schematic designers of offenses of his era, and that didn't change in Dallas. More importantly, McCarthy's replacement (and there will almost certainly be one in 2025) should be hired primarily because McClay - the new GM in our scenario - sees things the same way as the new guy does.

It doesn't matter who that head coach is; it matters that the actual football people in the building believe that said coach has the ability to lead and drive the organization to more tangible football success, and that said coach and said new general manager see things similarly. Hiring head coaches either because they knew how to say, "Yes, sir" at the right time, or because they were big enough names to distract from the inability to win at the highest levels?

Well, Jones has been doing that for 30 years now, and we already know how that has gone. Let the football people make football decisions. You are not the football people. It's pretty simple.

_{Build for depth as opposed to star power.}

When Prescott is healthy, he's still a top-quality quarterback. Lamb is one of the best and most prolific receivers in the NFL. Parsons may be the league's best pure pass-rusher when everything is aligned correctly. And yes, there's a lot of young talent on the squad. But when you observe the Cowboys' depth chart with a critical eye, there's too little behind the established stars and young top prospects.

The best teams in any sport understand that the bottom third of the roster might at some point become as important as the top third, and depth is build accordingly. Dallas' need to do this now is exacerbated by their 2025 salary cap situation. Even if they're able to sign Parsons to a new contract that would lessen the star's upcoming mandatory cap hit of $21,324 million based on his rookie deal, there's less than $30 million to spend, and not a lot of offloading to be done that would up that number. And given Jones' history of waiting too long to sign his stars, and turning those battles into cap nightmares, it's not really encouraging. In addition, the Cowboys have already mortgaged about as much future cap liability as they possibly can, so the cupboard is relatively bare... and the grocery store is too far away.

To the team's (and specifically McClay's) credit, the recent Cowboys do have their share of success stories with both third-day picks and undrafted stars. But that will have to become a point of focus as opposed to a once-in-a-while thing, because no top-heavy roster in today's NFL is going to win a Super Bowl. The Kansas City Chiefs understood this even as Patrick Mahomes was starting his championship run, and they focused on building a new, young defense out of potential stars that were underrated and undervalued by other teams. That's why they're still a danger to win it all - again - even when the offense isn't performing well. When you have that much roster strength and depth, you are always a problem for your opponents, even and especially when something isn't going the way you'd prefer.

In terms of that roster strength and depth, the Cowboys are more from the microwave school than gourmet chefs. That must change before the ship is actually righted.

Will anything actually change? The odds are against it, but the Cowboys have no choice if they want to have an actual chance at a Lombardi Trophy for the first time in this millennium.