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Jerry Jones is somehow the NFL’s most brilliant owner and also its most unserious. I mean that in the nicest way possible. The billionaire Dallas Cowboys owner quite literally revolutionized the NFL’s business model, forcing the league to reconsider its revenue-sharing principles after suing them for $700 million several decades ago.

When Jerry Jones purchased the Dallas Cowboys for $150 million in 1989, they were losing $1 million a month. Today, the Cowboys are worth $10 billion, making them the world’s most valuable sports team, regardless of continent, country, sport, or league.

The Cowboys generate $800 million in local revenue annually, while no other NFL team has crossed $400 million. They bring in hundreds of millions more in operating income than the next closest team and were the first team in sports history to exceed $1 billion in annual revenue, which they have now done for three consecutive years.

Put it this way: Jerry Jones is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame for a reason, and it’s not winning. Otherwise, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft wouldn’t have to run a marketing campaign to parlay his six Super Bowl rings into a fitted gold jacket.

Despite not winning a Super Bowl since the 1990s, the Cowboys have become known as “America’s Team.” Jerry Jones has been the Cowboys owner, president, and general manager since day one, and his three kids run the team’s most critical departments.

Stephen Jones is the Cowboys chief operating officer (COO), Charlotte Jones is the chief brand officer, and Jerry Jones Jr. runs the sales and marketing department.

This is easily the most unique ownership structure in sports. Cowboys fans didn’t care when Jerry Jones won three Super Bowls in his first seven seasons as an owner. But now that the Cowboys have failed to reach the NFC Championship game, much less the Super Bowl, in 30 straight years, it’s clear that the current system isn’t working.

The Cowboys still play football games on Sundays and pay players more than $250 million annually. But this isn’t your typical NFL team. Jerry Jones has turned the Cowboys into a business first, a team second, and a soap opera every day of the week.

The brilliance of Jerry Jones as a businessman was immediately evident. After Donald Trump turned down an opportunity to buy the Dallas Cowboys for $50 million in 1984, saying he “felt sorry for the poor guy” who ended up purchasing the team because it was a “no-win situation,” Jones bought an asset that was losing $1 million a month.

Jones paid $65 million for 100 percent control of the stadium. He assumed $15 million of debt on the Cowboys Valley Ranch headquarters and purchased a 63% stake in the team at a valuation of $60 million. In fact, the Dallas Cowboys were in such financial trouble that the government (FDIC) had foreclosed on 13% of the team.

Jones was over an hour late to his introductory press conference because he had flown to Austin to fire longtime coach Tom Landry. He then spent the next several months cleaning house, with the team’s coach, president, treasurer, and head scout leaving.

Many of the team’s lower-level employees also lost their jobs, as Jones told fans that the team had 130 employees doing the job of 30 employees. Jones thought the organization was bloated and believed he could do their jobs more efficiently.

This reduced expenses and made the team’s debt payments more manageable. But it also laid the foundation for a business model that still exists in the NFL today.

Jones was the first sports owner in Texas to serve beer inside his stadium. In what is still the NFL’s most lopsided trade, he sent Herschel Walker to the Vikings, returning five players and eight draft picks that built the Cowboys into a dynasty in the 1990s.

Then, in 1995, Jerry Jones went to war with the NFL. The Cowboys owner bypassed the NFL’s revenue-sharing agreement to sign sponsorship deals with Pepsi-Cola and Nike worth $6.5 million annually for the Cowboys’ stadium. Jones did this because he realized that while NFL sponsorship deals were split equally among all NFL teams, the Cowboys could keep all revenue generated from Texas Stadium sponsorship deals.

The NFL (obviously) didn’t like this. Nike was not an NFL sponsor at the time, and Pepsi’s competitor, Coca-Cola, was paying the league millions annually to serve its drinks in 28 of 30 NFL stadiums. So, the NFL filed a $300 million lawsuit against Jerry Jones, claiming he intentionally breached the league’s revenue-sharing agreement.

Jerry Jones then filed a $700 million countersuit against the NFL, with the two parties eventually settling out of court. This was a monumental moment in the history of sports business, as the settlement allowed teams to seek their own business deals and gain more power over their own marketing rights, a practice that is still in place today.

The Cowboys have since used that blueprint to build a $10 billion business. In 1996, they launched their own merchandise business, cutting out the middleman by designing, manufacturing, and distributing Cowboys merchandise to retailers.

In 2008, Jerry Jones and the Cowboys teamed up with the New York Yankees to launch Legends Hospitality, a stadium operations company that handles concessions and merchandising sales at dozens of sports venues nationwide.

The Cowboys also have a 10-year, $200 million deal with Molson Coors to sell beer at AT&T Stadium. And no NFL team has a better stadium setup than Dallas, as the Cowboys only pay $2.5 million annually to the city of Arlington, but have a $20 million naming rights deal with AT&T and get to keep all revenue from non-football events, like concerts, the Cotton Bowl, FIFA World Cup, and the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight.

Ultimately, this is how the Cowboys became so valuable. While other teams count on the NFL’s national distribution checks (e.g., media rights), the Cowboys have become a national brand, earning $800 million each year in what the NFL categorizes as local revenue — ticket sales, concessions, parking, stadium sponsorship deals, and more.

This has created a new economic blueprint for NFL teams. In fact, you could argue that Jerry Jones is more responsible than anyone else for the NFL’s financial success.

The only problem is that the monetization of a brand can consume you. Jerry Jones knows that attention is the new oil. And the best way to keep growing your business is to turn your team into a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year soap opera.

This is why Jerry Jones has invested so heavily in the fan experience. From thousands of fans visiting Oxnard, California, each year to watch training camp practices to the team’s $1.5 billion practice facility called “The Star,” no stone is left unturned. The Dallas Cowboys don’t just want a starring role; they want to be the only show in town.

For example, a film crew has been following Jerry Jones around for a documentary set to be released later this year. The billionaire owner also purchased an Airbus H145 helicopter to reduce the 45-minute drive from the Cowboys practice facility to the stadium to just 13 minutes. Jones has been seen interrupting team practices to land the helicopter on the practice field and always talks about how it’s a marketing tool.

“It lends an aura to the Cowboys, whether we’re circling the stadium and landing in the parking lot on game day or carrying business associates and sponsors,” Jones told Robb Report. “It gets [the fans] attention and keeps them thinking about us.”

The Cowboys also generate $10 million in annual revenue by selling 500,000 ticketed tours of their practice facility and stadium. Tickets into “The Star” cost between $40 and $70, with fans getting to experience a “day in the life” of a Cowboys player by touring the team’s cafeteria, weight rooms, coaches’ offices, and other personnel areas.

This may seem like a harmless way to generate revenue while also building brand affinity. But not everyone is a fan, as many Cowboys players have called it distracting.

“There are people literally going on tours while you’re lifting in the weight room, and they’ve got a one-way mirror for people to look in. Like it’s literally, it’s a zoo dude, you’ve got people tapping on the glass trying to get people’s attention as they’re doing power cleans,” Former Dallas Cowboys tight end Houston Schultz told Pat McAfee.

The more significant problem is that this always-be-marketing mindset has expanded into football operations.

Why else would Jerry Jones wait to extend franchise cornerstones CeeDee Lamb and Dak Prescott until the last possible moment after several other contracts got done to raise their market price? What is the reasoning behind waiting to sign Micah Parsons to an extension and letting Mike McCarthy spend last season as a lame-duck coach?

That’s without even mentioning what happened to Cooper Rush, who was in line for a $250,000 bonus based on a snap count incentive, only to be benched the last week of the season for Trey Lance, a soon-to-be free agent who hadn’t played in two years.

Jerry Jones says he didn’t know about Cooper Rush’s bonus. But that raises even more questions. Is he the general manager or not? That’s something a GM should know.

FS1’s Danny Parkins has theorized that this was done to create intrigue for Jerry Jones’ new Netflix documentary. Colin Cowherd has also questioned whether Jones intentionally leaked his interest in hiring Deion Sanders to get NFL media to talk about the Cowboys during the playoffs, saying the news needs to be taken seriously because Deion would help the Cowboys boost ticket sales while attracting attention.

“Here’s the issue, and this is why you’ve gotta take the Deion Sanders thing seriously, the Cowboys training camp – lowest attendance ever. When they played the Packers and the Niners, a third of the stadium in Dallas is filled with Packers and Niners fans…Deion gets attention. He’ll make them fascinating,” Colin Cowherd said on his show.

Maybe these theories are accurate, or perhaps they aren’t. But it doesn’t matter. It has become abundantly clear that Jerry Jones cares much more about how many people are talking about the Cowboys rather than what those people are actually saying.

This attention has made Jerry Jones a ton of money over the years. The Cowboys aren’t just another NFL team; they are America’s team. But at what point does too much become too much? Jerry Jones seems intent on figuring out if that line exists.

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