Jerry Jones absolutely went off on a radio hit with Shan & RJ on our sibling station, 105.3 in Dallas, earlier this week, and while it’s very rare that we want to send you to listen to audio from even our own company colleagues, you have to hear what sent him over the edge.
JP Finlay played a little bit of the clip from Jerry’s appearance on our air, and even said “it sounds a lot worse than you think.” Brian Mitchell, who played his whole career in the NFC East with his 14 years coinciding with Jerry’s first 14 as Dallas owner, knows both sides of the media and Jerry…and B stood up for Shan Shariff and RJ Choppy after hearing the clip.
“Let me just say this: any one of our jobs here is to ask questions. You can answer the question how you want to answer it, but our job is to ask you the questions to get the information that the fans may want to hear, or what they're talking about,” Brian said. “He wasn’t trying to sit up here and tell you what to do, he’s asking you, and you can present it however you want to present it.”
Brian of course gets it on both sides, and no matter what side he looks at it from, the key takeaway was this is on Jerry.
“I've been on both sides of this thing, and I’ve answered questions when I thought they might have been a little off-base; I talked for five or 10 minutes and maybe never answered the question, but I talked,” Brian said. “Good game, bad game, I sat there and talked to the media. Later on, you find out they got a job to do, and if they come in and you’re just respectful with the job, you get the benefit of the doubt in the long run. But, if you do what Jerry did and try to take a dump all over somebody, you are now gonna be taken to task every time they have a chance. And that's just where a lot of people in this profession lose – when you just basically try to dismiss people, they will get you back.”
Jerry tried to walk it back a little in a later interview with Dianna Russini, but the point remains that status, money, and title doesn’t matter – nothing matters in this case except the Golden Rule, which didn’t seem to be in play.
“I don't care how much money you got, can’t beat those microphones, ‘cause just like they always say somebody is bigger better than you, somebody got a little bit more money than you too,” B said. “Somebody with some more money than Jerry may want to hear all the bad stuff about it.”
JP, who has been on the Commanders beat for over a decade, even acknowledged that “it’s like a race to the bottom when you get into it with the media,” and he can ‘only imagine how many media members in Dallas have protected Jerry over the years’ – and he agrees with B.
“We know the people, but even removing what may or may not be my personal bias, my conception is that those questions didn't warrant that response,” JP said. “Those guys did not ask anything that was over the line – Jerry was the one who was over the line.”
“Basically, what his answer did was tell people that he knows he's screwing up, that's what it did,” Brian replied. “Sometimes I just read between the lines, and he basically said, ‘I'm not doing a good job and I'm not letting you get it out of me.’ It’s not your job, I’ll get somebody else to ask the question – if somebody asks those exact same questions, would you have a different answer, or are you afraid of the question? Because now, the question means if I answer it properly, I have to expose myself as being not good at my job, and that has been proven.”
And as for his statement to Russini about ‘the guys he’s paying’ asking those questions?
“Is he paying Shan? Does he own the station he works for? No, you have a partnership agreement, and if you’re paying them, it's because they're covering your team, so you’re not paying them, you’re giving them a trade-off,” Brian said. “When I was working for this station and 980 was owned by Red Zebra, most people on the station we were tiptoeing – I don’t get hired to tiptoe. If you hire me to get my opinions, I'm gonna get my damn opinions, good or bad. And I think what he’s basically saying is if we have a partnership, you're supposed to always let me have my way. That's not a partnership.”
Take a listen to the whole convo, as the guys go into Dallas’ decline since the end of the Jimmy Johnson era, up above, as well as the actual clip from 105.3 The Fan.