Several Cowboys legends attended the premiere of the upcoming Netflix documentary series, America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys, which will dive into the franchise’s dynasty and three Super Bowl victories in the 1990s. As Dallas’s stars reminisce on the glory days, it’s not lost on them that they haven’t won a Super Bowl in nearly 30 years and hold the NFC’s longest conference championship game drought.
Three-time Super Bowl champion and Hall of Fame running back Emmitt Smith believes the onus for this drought falls on the players, not Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.
“Well, Jerry never caught a pass. He never ran the ball and he damn sure didn’t throw it,” Emmitt Smith said, via Jon Machota of The Athletic. “At some point players have got to take on ownership of what they’ve been trained and what they’ve been taught to do. We had to do it. We won back-to-back Super Bowls, and then we lost our leader [coach Jimmy Johnson, who resigned in 1994] and we were in disarray for a year. But as a player and as the leadership of that ball club, we took it upon ourselves to say, ‘This is what we’re gonna do. We don’t care who’s at the helm.’ My systems are still the same, my processes are still the same. We know how to work, we’ve been trained how to work. We were built from the ground up. That foundation never left, so therefore we were able to go back and win our third.”
The players of any team of course bare much of the responsibility for whether they win or lose. For much of the last 30 years, the Cowboys have been contenders and have regularly made the playoffs, but have failed to reach the Super Bowl since the 90s.
However, the blame shouldn’t solely fall on the players. After all, it is up to ownership and the front office to acquire talent and set the culture for their franchise. The Jones family has a strong track record of drafting great players, but often falls behind when it comes to free agency and re-signing their top players.
By dilly dallying on extensions to their star players, Jones and the Cowboys have created tension with players like CeeDee Lamb and Micah Parsons, distractions for the team, and have likely cost themselves cap space. While successful franchises like the Eagles are ahead of the curve in both free agency and re-signing top talent, the Cowboys simply feel stuck in the 90s at times.
