After 30 Years, Cowboys Legend Finally Clears Feelings On Causing Jerry Jones & Jimmy Johnson Fall Out

March 21, 1994: Dallas Morning News’ Rick Gosselin and Ed Werder were almost done with their day covering the annual NFL owners conference when Jerry Jones sauntered into the bar area of Orlando’s Hyatt Grand Cypress. “You sure as h-ll don’t want to go to bed and miss the biggest story of the year,” he had fumed, his breath already reeking of alcohol after experiencing an utter humiliation. It had only been two months since the Dallas Cowboys‘ second straight Super Bowl, and Jones, still wanting to celebrate, had walked up to head coach Jimmy Johnson’s table a while ago.

The catch is: That very table also sat members from the Cowboys staff who had previously been fired by the owner. So, in response to Jones raising a toast, they treated him with pin-drop silence. “F— all of you. I’ll toast and celebrate with my friends,” the team owner had yelled and stormed off. The result? Till 5 am that morning, Jerry Jones kept speaking. He talked about all he felt was wrong with Johnson: His attitude, penchant for doing things his way, and most of all, his reported disrespect. “I’m going to fire that son of a bi–ch,” Jones had declared to the two journalists. Eight days later, that became reality. While the story seems rather simple, there’s still a lot to unpack here, including Tony Casillas’ role in the feud.

After Netflix released America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys last week, the former defensive tackle found out he was also an unwitting ingredient. On August 24, the player took to Instagram to address that situation from 1991. “I just saw something the other day. Someone sent me something on the whole interview. I didn’t know that,” he noted in the reel, before adding, “I was surprised just like anyone else that that’s where it started because Jimmy was the one that made the trade for me and then I guess evidently Jerry was taking the credit for it. I don’t know, that’s kind of where this whole thing started, supposedly.”

Notably, when Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys, he handed the reins to his old Arkansas teammate, Johnson, trusting him to rebuild from the ground up. Johnson’s tenure was transformative, scrapping almost everything and everyone to breed a dynasty. But under the spotlights, credit became the game of the day. As Johnson recalled in the interview clip that was shared with Casillas, “We started having some problems. One of them, for instance: I traded for Tony Casillas. I turned on the television about 10 minutes later and Jerry’s doing a press conference, and he said, ‘I traded for Tony Casillas.’ And I’m thinking, ‘He didn’t trade for Tony Casillas, I traded for Tony Casillas’.”

But, the Casillas trade wasn’t the only time Jones rushed for ownership of the narrative. As the Cowboys skyrocketed from a 1-15 laughing stock to Super Bowl champions, Jones reportedly wanted the spotlight to shine on his business acumen as much as Johnson’s playbook. 

The fallout was seismic, and left everyone to wonder: Would the Cowboys have won more championships if the power struggle hadn’t erupted? The players seem to think so. “We should’ve won five. We should’ve at least walked away with a minimum of five Super Bowls,” Michael Irvin once noted, lamenting wasted potential.

Having said that, the question now isn’t who gets the credit, but who writes the next chapter. For Dallas, that page still remains unwritten.