When owners get in the way: Jerry Jones isn't the first—and he won't be the last—head of a team to venture into areas where he simply doesn't belong

Football Digest, Feb, 2002 by Barry Wilner

IS THERE DISSENSION AMONG the ranks of NFL owners? You bet.

Speaking off the record, one longtime NFL owner had this to say about the new breed of men running pro football teams these days: "They are asses. They have no idea how to run a team, and most of them have no idea what the NFL is about. They think because they are successful in other businesses, they can walk into the NFL and change everything."

This owner didn't name names. But he may as well have been referring to men like Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and Daniel Snyder of the Washington Redskins.

Still, it's not just the relative newcomers who have caused some distress in the league's inner sanctum. Art Modell nearly provoked a palace revolt when he moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore and turned them into the Ravens.

Eddie DeBartolo Jr. caused the NFL all kinds of embarrassment for his role in a Louisiana gambling corruption scandal. He subsequently was forced out as owner of the San Francisco 49ers.

The Chicago Bears' Michael McCaskey helped sink that proud franchise to the bottom of the league team founder George Halas had started.

And how about cantankerous Al Davis and clueless Bill Bidwill, longtime owners who have managed to get in the way of their team's progress?

While Davis was inducted into the Hall of Fame (Class of 1992) for everything his Raiders had achieved, they became something of a laughingstock in the 1990s. Davis was so busy fighting his perceived enemies in court--specifically Pete Rozelle, Paul Tagliabue, and other NFL owners--that he tended to ignore the quality of his roster. He finally has learned to step away and let Jon Gruden and the rest of the staff the coach has assembled run things. And now the Raiders are championship material again.

Davis' penchant for interfering was legendary in NFL circles. Two of the coaches he lost because of his meddling were Mike Shanahan (head coach in 1988 and four games in '89 before he was fired, partly for standing up to the owner) and Jim Haslett (an assistant in 1993 and '94 who left partly because he was disenchanted by Davis' interference). Both have moved on to successful coaching positions elsewhere, especially Shanahan, who won two Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos, something that must gall Davis.

Bidwill managed to alienate the entire Valley of the Sun with the way he mismanaged his Arizona Cardinals while making demands for a new stadium financed mostly by the public. The Cardinals, whom he moved from St. Louis in 1988 with the idea of turning Phoenix into a pro football mecca, rank 30th of 31 NFL teams in value.

After the 2000 season, in which his team went 3-13, Bidwill raised ticket prices. It was the team's first ticket increase in five years, but it also came after voters had approved a hotel-motel tax and rental car surcharge to build a new stadium.

Perhaps the most comical of all team bosses was McCaskey. Just ask current Cardinals coach Dave McGinnis about him. McCaskey announced the hiring of McGinnis as Bears coach in January 1999 ... before McGinnis formally was offered the job. The team scheduled a news conference to introduce McGinnis--who at the time was Arizona's defensive coordinator and had been a Chicago assistant--as its new coach. The Bears even changed the message on the coaching department's voice mail to say, "You have reached the office of head coach David McGinnis."

McGinnis heard about it on the car radio as he was driving to the Bears' complex to continue negotiations. "That was an internal foul-up," McCaskey said. "We made a mistake on that. We didn't intend for it to happen. It's something we did internally ... we made a mistake, and I don't want to go into detail about it."

McGinnis was stunned by McCaskey's presumptuousness. "It started, obviously, with the announcement made before we had anything signed," McGinnis said. "And it went downhill from there."

The franchise already was heading downhill, a trend that lasted for much of the 1990s. And McCaskey was at the center of the decline. Despite having no football experience--he was an academic before taking over the Halas family business--McCaskey often sat in on drafts. When he fired Dave Wannstedt as coach, he told personnel director Mark Hatley to compile a list of candidates and conduct interviews, even though Hatley's job was to head the scouting department. Chicago's personnel department spiraled into turmoil.

McCaskey was cited by many of those involved in negotiations for a new stadium as the main obstacle to reaching a deal. Once he was moved out of the way and Ted Phillips took over, the city and the team finalized an agreement Ironically, McCaskey, a former professor at the Harvard Business School, once wrote a book called "The Executive Challenge: Managing Change and Ambiguity."

One must wonder if Jones ever read that epic? Of course, it was downright wrong to criticize Jones in the early 1990s after he had restored Super Bowl glory to the downtrodden franchise he purchased in 1989. Under Jones, and with Jimmy Johnson running the football side, the Cowboys won NFL titles in 1992 and '93. Then, in a spitting match the size of all of Texas, Johnson left. Jones then took over personnel duties.