DALLAS — Jerry Jones returned to the radio airwaves Tuesday morning, and no one got fired.
All seems well between the Dallas Cowboys owner and the morning hosts at 105.3 The Fan, where Jones conducts his weekly radio interview but said he'd "get somebody else to ask these questions" during a fiery exchange last week.
Jones in the since-viral moment had unloaded on the "Shan and RJ" crew after they pressed him on the Cowboys' struggling start to the season.
Jones, however, wasn't exactly apologetic when he returned to the show Tuesday morning.
"I don't have anything to say about last week," he responded when asked about the controversy at the top of the segment. "I'm surprised that last week got the attention it got."
Jones then proceeded to talk for several minutes about the spat, saying he's used to taking tough questions (which is true) and that the weekly radio interviews are "really a privilege" to get an inside look at the team.
"It's kind of like pillow talk," Jones said. "You get some inside stuff."
Jones compared the interviews to conversations he might have with his wife, Gene.
"I will you tell you [it's] the same kind of question is my wife might ask me, of 60-something years," Jones said. "Why did you do that? I don't know. The devil made me do it."
"The point is, those kind of questions are pointedly toward putting you on a spot to make a certain kind of answer ... I've been asked that Derrick Henry question every day since training camp. That's a get-in-your-ass type of question."
Jones brought up the subject of Henry unprompted, assuming that would be among the questions Tuesday morning after Henry had another strong performance Monday night. Henry was thought to be a possible free agent signing with the Cowboys, but a deal never surfaced and Dallas' struggling run game has led to questions ever since.
In any case, Jones and The Fan hosts seemed to be on fine terms, and Jones, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn't mind the attention last week.
"I'm tickled to death we have as much interest in this as we do," Jones said.
Jones was more than happy to talk football, as well.
Jones continued to explain why Henry wasn’t an option for a Cowboys team that is last in the league in rushing yards.
“How do I make a decision? I go back to when I bought the team,” said Jones. “We got it down to $300,000 and we flipped a coin and I Iost and I was the owner of the Dallas Cowboys. I don’t know why I picked what I picked.”
“Henry is having a career year. I don’t know if he’d be having that kind of year in our situation. We don’t run that type of offense at all. He didn’t fit, principally because of the cap and in anticipation of players we will need to get signed.”
Jones moved on to discuss what lies ahead for Dallas on the other side of their bye with the Cowboys heading out West to take on a 49ers squad that has had their number of late despite sitting at 3-4 in 2024.
“Listen, we’re 3-3,” said Jones. “Can we be a better team? Can we get ourselves where we’re not run out of the stadium? Yes we can. Of course we can. We all need to reevaluate decisions. All of us. I have to do it all the time. Mike [McCarthy] has to do that.”
Jones also recalled the last time he made an in-season coaching change, something that he said he would not do to remove McCarthy following the Week 6 blowout loss to Detroit. “I remember when I changed to Jason Garrett,” Jones replied. “I regret that decision. I wish I hadn’t done that. Wade Phillips went on to coach in Denver and people said they won the Super Bowl because of coaching, because of Phillips, and I let him go.”
With McCarthy on the final year of his contract, he’ll have to do what he and the Cowboys accomplished last year when they hit the ground running following their bye week and saw a surge in performance from the offense.
One of the ways Dallas can accomplish that is with better play from their receivers. During the bye week, former Super Bowl-winning quarterback Troy Aikman had criticized the Cowboys’ receiving corps for their lack of ability to create separation and poor route-running. Jones addressed those criticisms, as well.
“Troy [Aikman] knows football,” Jones surmised. “My goodness, he lives it. He’s one of the most astute at looking at tape and evaluating it. Troy is credible, and he's not just interested in taking a whack at the Cowboys. Our receivers need to work on pushing through physical contact, as an example. But I’m pretty confident that we’ll be able to improve.”
Improvements will need to come in-house as Jones again reiterated that help likely isn’t coming ahead of the NFL’s Nov. 5 trade deadline.
“I don’t see anything that would impact us in any way,” said Jones. “We made the decision of how we’re going forward when I extended Dak [Prescott] and signed CeeDee [Lamb]. So if you see us trading anyone or trading for someone at the trade deadline, that means we’re moving in a different direction. You have to make these decisions with the future of the cap in mind.”
Though Jones began the show ready to move on from last week’s outburst, by the end, he circled back to talk about what he wants to accomplish by holding a radio show every week.
“I like the way we do this show,” said Jones. “I don’t think it does us any harm for us to have disagreements or show emotion. I think that’s all a part of it. You can’t be involved in this game without showing emotion. I try to have more than just answers that you can get from reading the paper. I try to answer with emotion.
I have no issue getting in front of a bunch of journalists and media and answering a bunch of questions. We’re just not playing good football right now.”
Dallas will need to play better football with a difficult slate in the season’s second half. That starts with a trip to Levi's Stadium for a Sunday Night Football clash against the 49ers where Jones is surely hoping the Cowboys will give him something positive to talk about next Tuesday morning.
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