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Jerry Jones talks out loud again

By Bill Lyon

Knight-Ridder Newspapers

(KRT)

PHILADELPHIA - Proving again that everything in Texas really is bigger, but especially ego, Jerry Jones has let slip out the best-known secret in the National Football League: He yearns to coach the team he owns.

To listen to Jones is to get the distinct impression that it is not a matter of if he will get around to coaching the Dallas Cowboys, only a matter of when.

Jones is simply saying out loud what almost every owner in professional sports has thought privately at one time or another - I could do better than this idiot.

That is what separates sports from other commerce. Not many of us would have the temerity to look over Bill Gates' shoulder, say, and second-guess the design of a computer: "You know, Bill, that modem's esophagus really needs to be just the teensiest bit wider if you want it to interface with the carburetor."

But secretly we all think we know sports. Who among us has not shouted at the TV screen: "A screen pass, moron, call a screen pass!"

The history of owners who also coach, in any sport, is shorter than the lifespan of a firefly. With good reason. It hardly ever works.

The last man to make such folly in the NFL was George Halas, who was also one of the league's founding fathers. But such tricky things as the salary cap and Deion Sanders did not exist then.

Al Davis, who named himself emperor of Raiderdom for life, is the de facto coach of his team. But for some time now he's had more success at extorting cities out of relocation money than in actually winning games.

As for Jones, he has been inching closer and closer to the headset. When he and his first coach, Jimmy Johnson, divorced so rancorously, a lot of football folk thought Jones might just go ahead and take over everything then.

More than a little envious of all the credit Johnson was getting, Jones opined aloud that with Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin and other such talent at his disposal, just about any boob could win.

To prove it, he hired Barry Switzer.

As it is, the Boys are coached mostly by committee now. We are told that the assistants tend to their specialties. There is even an assistant known privately as the Buffer Coach. He was reportedly brought in to serve as go-between between Aikman and Switzer.

The quarterback has a seething, thinly concealed dislike for, and contempt of, the head coach. You'd think such a tumultuous relationship would be counterproductive, yet the Boys keep winning their division.

Switzer, meanwhile, is in charge of calling fourth-down runs, and then calling them again. It is, incidentally, one of the more intriguing puzzlements in sports, how a man could crank out so many national championship teams while in college and then metamorphose into such a bumbling buffoon at the pro level.

Jones waffles back and forth, coy one moment and self-serving the next. Yes, it would be monumentally egotistic of him to coach. And yet barely a day goes by that he doesn't think of it. One of the advantages of being extremely wealthy is that there isn't an itch that you cannot scratch. So all that is left now is for Jerry Jones to talk Jerry Jones into going ahead and doing what he wants, in the very center of his self-centeredness, to do.

Jones made his money in the oil and gas exploration business. That is the ultimate working-without-a-net business. When, after a thousand dry holes, a man brings in a gusher, he can't help but feel as though there isn't anything he can't do. Including coaching a Super Bowl team.

"Owner and general manager in the game today is as far as you can extend yourself," Jones conceded in one interview.

And then, moments later, he was saying: "But there is something in me that would like to coach. I don't back away from that at all. I don't shy away from that."

Jones played football in college, at Arkansas. He was cocaptain. He knows the game. And what springs to mind right about here is that saying about how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

The most meddling owners almost always are the ones who think they know the sport.

In Philadelphia, the 76ers are still trying to recover from the proprietorship of Harold Katz, who involved himself in virtually every personnel decision. His defense was, and still is, that it was his money and his team, and that he had bought the right to involve himself as deeply as he wanted.

Jones is a swashbuckler, a risk-taker. He is undeniably shrewd and revels at playing the renegade.

He has succeeded, he is fond of saying, because people keep underestimating how smart he really is.

The irony is that now he is overestimating.

(Bill Lyon is a sports columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Write to him at: The Philadelphia Inquirer, 400 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pa. 19130.)