Oh Jerrah, Where Art Thou?

In this week’s back-to-camp edition of Walkthrough:

• The Dolphins secondary becomes a literal No Fly Zone.
• The Saints All-Dead Cap Team gets even better.
• Desmond Walker and Shilo Sanders keep things weird in Tampa.
• Iron Man lives again!

And more! But first …

The Jerrah in Winter

At the peak of his powers, Jerry Jones was an outsized American archetype: the ultimate evolution of the ballsy, bloviating billionaire into a spotlight-addicted plutocratic peacock.

Jerrah used generosity to project power. He dealt in flattery like it was a junk bond. He wasn’t the riverboat poker sharp he imagined himself to be – he was more like the white whale in the complimentary casino penthouse – but he had a pretty good feel for when to hold ‘em and fold ‘em, plus the gumption to make a heap of all his winnings. He was as boisterously, unapologetically Texan as only a boy from Arkansas can be. He didn’t wear a ten-gallon hat on his head, but on his sleeve.

It’s sad to see Jerrah in his current state: penurious, irascible, downright joyless at the most wonderful time of his year. Cowboys training camp started on Monday, but Jerrah sounded less like the owner of one of America’s most storied sports franchises than like a bitter old codger accusing the help of rifling through his dresser to steal his cufflinks.

The Cowboys are at the mood-swinging mercy of a sundowning scoundrel who makes financial decisions out of spite instead of common sense. America’s Team, indeed.

It’s inappropriate and distasteful to diagnose mental conditions based on media soundbites. Better (???) and more respectful of the man’s dignity (????) to call Jerrah an idiot, a tightwad or an attention-starved manchild than to suggest that the 82-year old is publicly displaying some unmistakable signs of cognitive decline.

But Jerrah was never a tightwad until a few years ago; quite the opposite. He was also never an “idiot” by NFL owner standards. Many of his peers cannot be trusted to operate a toothbrush without help. Jerrah, however, built his stately pleasure dome, resurrected the flagging Cowboys brand in the early 1990s and was a better general manager than at least the bottom quartile of the men around the NFL who came to that job with actual qualifications. The attention-seeking behavior has always been there, but he used to get what he wanted with honey, not by dousing his beloved players with vinegar.

Sometime in the last few years, Jerrah stopped hardball negotiating and started simply procrastinating. His verbal filter began short-circuiting. His aphorisms went from colorful to incomprehensible. Last October, he lashed out at radio hosts he had worked with for years. The Cowboys couldn’t even conduct a coherent coaching search this offseason. Every ownership-level decision in the last two years has been an unnecessary crisis.

Then came Monday’s depressing airing of grievances at the team’s introductory press conference. Jerrah indicated that he has been slow to extend Micah Parsons because the superstar edge rusher missed “six games” last year (four, actually), then lamented paying Dak Prescott, who “got knocked out for two-thirds of the year.” Trevon Diggs and Terence Steele caught pointless strays as Jerrah cast about for justifications for not paying one of the NFL’s best players his ever-increasing market value.

"Contracts are four, five years, OK? There's a lot of water under the bridge if you step out there and do something in the first two or three," Jerrah said at one point. "You can get hit by a car, seriously.”

Full disclosure: I took my elderly mother shopping for necessities a few hours before Jerrah’s presser. She couldn’t decide which package of a particular product she wanted to buy at the pharmacy. In an effort to speed up a decision that was starting to take longer than the Parsons negotiations, I held up two sizes of the same product. “The larger package is a better bargain,” I explained, trying to get her to purchase a two-month supply.

“I don’t want to spend all of that money!” she said of the $14 expense. “What if I die before I use them all?”

Indeed. And what if Micah Parsons gets hit by a car?