In hindsight it was always kinda silly to assume that the Dallas Cowboys' bye week would come and go without any controversy. That's not really how things work in Dallas, and with a two-week stretch absent of any real football, there was always going to be something. And now we have our something!
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This week, a big ol' profile on Jerry Jones – and moreso life at the Cowboys' facility in general – dropped on ESPN. It's a bit of a longer read, but definitely worth your time. Essentially, the article focuses on how Cowboys fans are allowed to tour the team's facilities with a level of access that doesn't exist anywhere in football.
Facility tours are common around the league, but the article dives into a ton of detail on how much more in-depth they are in Dallas, which is coming at the expense of player happiness and comfort. It also, of course, comes with more than a couple tone-deaf Jones quotes. Credit where it's due: ESPN knows how to play the hits.
Dallas' fan facility tours are making Cowboys players pretty miserable
"The tours offer unique access to the inner workings of the team, which increases fan interest and revenue, but also subjects the players and coaches tasked with taking this team to the Super Bowl with what one player calls "random people" walking through and around their office daily. The Cowboys say the tours don't go into the players' spaces when they are using them, like the locker room and meeting rooms, and the bulk of the tours are scheduled when players are not practicing or in meetings. The team also scales back tours during the playoffs. But several former Cowboys told ESPN that the tours are one of the biggest distractions of working in Jerry's world and contradictory to Jones' stated goal of ending the 29-year Super Bowl drought."
To give you a peak behind the curtain: it was legitimately very difficult to pick out a blurb from that article, because of how many juicy ones I had to choose from. If you search the article for the word 'zoo,' it comes up three separate times.
These tours also apparently generate close to $10 million in annual revenue, which speaks to Cowboys fans' enthusiasm more than anything else (if that number's accurate).
Mostly, they just sound kinda awful for players to deal with, especially when they're losing. Having random people scream at you about winning more Super Bowls for the 15 seconds you're walking the hallway between meetings sounds like a miserable existence.
To the player's credit, there are on-record quotes in the piece about how the fan tours aren't the reason why they've struggled to win playoff games. But it's obvious that life in Dallas isn't as glamorous as it may seem, which actually probably doesn't surprise anyone at this point.