IRVING, Texas – Disappointments are sure to come throughout a 25-year span of owning a team, but one reigns supreme for owner/general manager Jerry Jones' tenure.
Jones said the failure to compete for a Super Bowl with quarterback Tony Romo on the team is his biggest disappointment while owning the Cowboys.
"We should have been knocking at the door, and we haven't," Jones said on 105.3 FM 'The Fan.' "No excuses. It starts here. But we have not. I know to the extent that we have a healthy Romo, our best chance to get back there right now, our best chance to get back to the Super Bowl, is a healthy Romo."
Jones referenced the time after Troy Aikman's career was over in Dallas how the Cowboys struggled to find a quarterback until getting Romo, and he believes the team needs to compete while the former undrafted quarterback's still the signal caller in Dallas.
The Cowboys have had some talented teams in the last decade or so. Jones went as far to say that he confers with consultants around the league who are "very experienced in personnel" and that it was accepted that the Cowboys' talent levels at times during Romo's tenure was in the top four or five in the league. [embedded_ad]
"For us not to have gotten it done during those years is a mess-up," Jones said. "You've got to get it when you're high like that, when you're high up on it. So I think that you can miss your bus when you've got your quarterback and you've got good talent around him, and if you miss that bus in the NFL, then you're going to have to dress back down on your cap, because in order to get that talent and pay it and keep it at that level, you're going to have to push that cap, and when you don't get there, those players can age on you, their actual skills diminish as well as your ammo, basically go down, because you're having to pay the fiddler for spending on the credit under your cap."
Jones knows it's on him and the rest of the front office to figure out how to maximize the Cowboys' talent and get to a Super Bowl while Romo's still around. They have to figure out which veterans are worth keeping around, and he admits there have been times in the recent past where contracts shouldn't have been paid.
"All of that boils down to management, management of a cap, management of having players deserve to get the money you got, so when I look back on it we probably paid some people we probably would have been better off not paying," Jones said.
