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Would Jerry Jones ever hire Deion Sanders as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys? Stephen A. Smith asked J.J. that very question and his answer may come as a surprise.
“Let me throw this out at you, Jerry,” Stephen A. Smith asked Jerry Jones. “This is, this is crazy. Crazy. I know this is, I can’t even imagine it happening.
“What if I said to you, ‘Jerry, Cowboys are going to lose again.’ And as a result you gonna find yourself feeling the need to make a change. And Jerry Jones decides one day down the road in the near future, assuming that he doesn’t achieve the success that he covets, that he’s going to hire Prime Time Deion Sanders as a head coach.
“That would be crazy. Is Jerry Jones crazy enough to do something like that someday?”
Jones then proceeded to make it very clear where he stands on the possibility of hiring Deion Sanders as head coach of the Cowboys.
“No, but he does know how to spell well enough and not answer a hypothetical question,” Jones replied.
“Hey, first of all, you are familiar with our, I’m going use it, the ‘love affair’ that we have. I have always admired him, both on and off the field. Some of the best stories that I have to tell about my time in sports have been Deion-type stories with Deion and Michael [Irvin] and those guys.”
Jerry Jones then went off in a tangent that was pretty clearly designed to avoid talking about hiring Deion Sanders as the Cowboys’ head coach.
“I remember the one that I love the most is he came in to sign his big contract. $12 million bonus at the time,” Jones recalled. “I had put a total cash, out of my cash, $12 million down to buy the Cowboys. $12 million to buy the Cowboys. Now I didn’t have to come up with the full $150, but I used all of my cash.
“Before I gave that to Deion Sanders, I went back to my hometown, Little Rock, Rose City, North Little Rock, and I walked down my old street. And I walked down it when that quarter and that dollar used to be everything. Walked down there, saw some old chips on a tree and on a telephone pole that I knocked out.
“I turned around and walked back because I wondered had something gotten over me, had I completely lost it to be thinking about paying a man $12 million dollar bonus to do it.
“I walked by my old house, went back over, got on that plane, that was then, this is now. I’m going for it.
“Went over, met Deion at the stadium. Never forget. Came in, great to see him. The whole time we were waiting to go on on stage and announce that he was going to be a Cowboy he spent playing with that boy. And all he could pay attention to, had all these people around, it was that boy. And I said that’s that’s a heart I want to be around right there.”
He forgot to add, “just not as the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys,” but we get the gist of it.