by Ryan Bush
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| Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones - Happy once again! |
Forgive Jerry Jones for being his usual gushing self in a
victorious Dallas Cowboys locker room the other night. Because nearly seventeen years after his last
Super Bowl championship, he may have actually had a legitimate reason to wave
his indomitable silver and blue pom-pom like a schoolgirl in front of her
graduating class.
You see, Wednesday’s 24-17 victory over the defending
champion Giants was more than about just the upset and the glory of winning a
division game on the road, a recent novelty around the Ranch. For Jones, it was a definitive in-your-face
gesture toward the New York
front-office. Exactly the kind of moment
that Jones enjoys best.
Jones’ off-season was marred when the NFL came down hard on
the Cowboys for overreaching their financial bounds in doling out huge payments
to Miles Austin, Demarcus Ware, and a handful of others, during the uncapped
2010 season. The league docked the team
according to how much they calculated Dallas
went over the “cap,” which was determined to be $10 million. So Dallas
was operating with $10 million less in their 2012 salary pool than they
expected. Now, compare that number to Washington’s $36 million
reduction, and things don’t look quite so bad.
But $10 million is still a good chunk of change to play with in
free-agency.
Jones vowed to appeal the ruling, claiming that NFL
commissioner Roger Goodell was delving into a legally compromising position of
semantics and double-talk. Jones wanted
to know how a team could be penalized for violating an unwritten gentleman’s
agreement by signing contracts that the league office had stamped their
approval upon.
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| Giants Owner - John Mara |
It was then that Giants owner John Mara smugly acknowledged
that the Cowboys had gotten off lightly, and should be grateful for this
reprieve from Goodell’s cabinet. It
could have been much worse for those poor little extravagant ‘Boys from Dallas, Mara assured the
world.
Mara, it was later reported, was the leading figure who
brought the infractions before the league office, and patiently waited for its
results to swamp the coasts of his division rivals. Now that the verdict had been officially
declared, Mara was simply basking in the moment of personal triumph and
smearing it in the face of Jones.
For undisclosed reasons, Jones eventually decided to drop
the appeal and play the season shorthanded, though it greatly upset his
off-season plans. $10 million out of
pocket, Jones and the Cowboys were unable to re-sign wide receiver Laurent
Robinson, who tallied eleven touchdown receptions last season, forcing them to
enter the 2012 campaign with a group of unknowns behind Miles Austin and Dez
Bryant on the depth chart.
It was especially satisfying for Jones to witness not only
his Cowboys take it to the Giants on the scoreboard, but little-known Kevin
Ogletree step into Robinson’s former position and fill up the stat sheet with
two scoring grabs of his own. Realizing
that the Giants had fallen from champs to division cellar-dwellers I’m sure
didn’t cause him to lose any sleep, either.
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