Stan Kroenke is St. Louis’ most despised team owner in professional sports for the sneaky, deceitful and backroom-deal manner in which he maneuvered to whisk the Rams out of St. Louis, then further infuriating his former customers by disparaging the market on his way out of town.
Also on the list of Gateway City villains is Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who was instrumental in brokering the deal with the NFL in January 2016 that allowed the Rams to move to Los Angeles after a proposal that the Chargers and Raiders, not Rams, would relocate there was shot down as Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt cast the lone dissenting vote among the six submitted by the NFL’s stadium committee.
Love him or loathe him, Jones is a colorful firebrand who speaks his mind as North America’s most hands-on owner in professional sports — he is the Cowboys’ general manager, calling the personnel shots, and loves the limelight. After all, how many other owners are available to the media soon after games and also have two regularly scheduled weekly radio appearances?
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Jones certainly has found that spotlight in recent days not only for the putrid performance of his club last Sunday in its 47-9 shellacking by the Detroit Lions — at home on his 82nd birthday, no less — but for his bristling response Tuesday to questions on one of his regular appearances on Dallas sports station KRLD FM, which airs the team’s games.
Jobs on the line?
After early pleasantries, about 13 minutes into a 20-minute-plus conversation, he , which largely directed the budget to re-signing quarterback Dak Prescott and wide receiver Cee Dee Lamb to huge contracts. Those deals were not finalized until shortly before the regular season opened and did not significantly address some of the team’s other needs, some of which now are glaring.
He became so upset that he insinuated that he would have the hosts (Shan Shariff, R.J. Choppy and contributor Bobby Belt) fired for having the audacity to do their jobs — asking questions about a team that had just suffered its worst home loss in Jones’ 3½ decades of owning the club.
“Listen, let me tell you what I’ll do about it: I will let us sit down and look at the decisions we’ve made over the last several years. OK? I’ll look at it,” Jones said. “Now if you think I’m interested on a damn phone call with you over the radio and sitting here and throwing all the good out with the dishwater, you’d have got to be smoking something over there this morning. I’m not. ... And I don’t even want our listeners listening to me talk about.
“This is not your job. Your job isn’t to let me go over all the reasons that I did something and I’m sorry that I did it,” Jones added. “That’s not your job. I’ll get somebody else to ask these questions. I’m not kidding. You’re not going to figure out what the team is doing right or wrong. If you are, or any five or 10 like you, you need to come to this (NFL) meeting I’m going to today with 32 teams here, you’re geniuses.
“You really think you’re going to sit here with a microphone and tell me all of the things that I’ve done wrong and without going over the ‘rights’? Listen, we both know we’re talking to a lot of great fans and a lot of great listeners. And I am very sorry for what happened out there Sunday. I’m sick about what happened Sunday.
“I’m not talking to these yahoos on the other end of this phone. I’m talking to you the fans that are listening this morning.”
Jones later was asked by about the exchange, saying “the wrong ones were doing the questioning,” hinting that he would either try to have them fired or stop going on their program that airs on a station on which he has made frequent appearances for more than a decade.
“(The) facts are that if I’m going to be grilled by the tribunal, I don’t need it to be by the guys I’m paying,” Jones said. “I can take it from fans and take it from other people. I take a lot of pride in how fair and how much I try to work with the media. We’re brothers and sisters. ... Now, if those had been real fans sitting there, or if there had been people that knew what they were talking about — football people — I might have had a different answer.”
Firing back
Shariff and Choppy have had widespread support from the national media and returned fire on their show the day after Jones’ outburst.
“I didn’t get upset with it, but it was like, ‘You know what? (The hell with you), man,’” Choppy said.
Added Shariff: “It’s really insulting, really demeaning, really insulting and again, out of nowhere. We have done 14 years of interviews with this man.”
“Never had fights like this,” Choppy added.
In the interview in which he became upset, Jones said: “You want some conversation this morning? You’re getting it.”
He calmed down for the rest of the interview and seemed engaging, signing off with “you all have a good day. Bye bye,” in a friendly tone of voice.
Nonetheless, Shariff took issue with Jones’ contention that the question he didn’t like came from someone on his payroll, pointing out that the station is owned by Audacy — not Jones.
“For damn sure it’s a fact that I don’t get paid or compensated by Jerry Jones, which I would love to be,” Shariff said. “Audacy signs my checks. ... I don’t want to get too much into station business and affairs. A lot of times though with teams, the financial arrangement is we get Jerry and (coach Mike) McCarthy and a player show and all that; the team gets the commercial inventory when the games are aired. So there’s no exchange of monies.”
Jones later touched on the matter with USA Today.
“I don’t want to demean or undermine their credibility, but we were kind of set up for taking me to the woodshed,” he said. “And I wasn’t ready for that. I was going to talk about the very things they wanted to talk about, but I didn’t want it before a tribunal.”
Jones reiterated the fact he didn’t like the questioning coming from the radio hosts but would have been fine if that had been from a fan.
“They set the tone,” he told . “I have fans all the time that I communicate with. They have more of a right, really, than guys that, frankly, I’m paying to put a show on.”
But paid or not by Jones, the line of questioning was reasonable given the team’s performance — it’s 3-3, with all the losses coming at home, where it is allowing an average of 39.7 points a game.
Choppy was on the national ““ on Wednesday, saying Jones has made almost 300 appearances on the station over the years.
“We don’t get personal with him,” Choppy said. “... He’s never had a problem with answering tough questions. When you’re the owner and the GM and you put yourself out on radio twice a week, every week, it’s hard to avoid those questions. To his credit, he’s never had a problem with them, and that’s what made this so surprising and disappointing, to be frank.
“... Our company, our bosses have been behind us. They’ve not said a word about that.”
Jones’ next scheduled appearance on the show, at least at last report, is set for Friday.