FRISCO, Texas – On Tuesday night, Jerry Jones was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, a group that honors sports broadcasting pioneers, visionaries and stars. In Jones' case, a 14+ hour long meeting, eight votes, and I Love Lucy helped him both earn his bid and change the trajectory of the NFL and sports forever.
Throughout the course of his time owning the Dallas Cowboys, Jones' fingerprints are all over the league's growth history with broadcasting having a lot to do with it.
"What broadcasting has done, what storytelling has done, what presentation of the games have done, they have made players bigger than life," Jones told DallasCowboys.com. "It has not been orchestrated, it is not like making movies and telling stories like that. This is real, live competition with great tradition. And broadcasting has, in my mind, made it happen."
"It takes what happens in just a few seconds, and makes stories and fables out of it."
The Meeting That Sparked It All
A week before Jones submitted his then record-setting $150 million offer to buy the Dallas Cowboys, he paid a visit to Daniel Burke, the chairman of Capital Cities, a major American media company, who had just completed a $3.5 billion acquisition of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and became president of the company shortly thereafter.
Initially, Jones was only slated to have an hour with Burke starting at 9 a.m. The meeting turned into a 14+ hour ordeal with the two ordering takeout and sharing drinks, discussing Burke's love for sport and his perspective on it from a broadcasting standpoint. That day, Burke made a statement that stuck with Jones, and still does to this day.
"Television cannot do without the NFL."
Why? Three reasons. First, because of the time of the year it's played in. The final quarter of the calendar, which Burke explained, is when decision-makers in the country get in front of a TV set. The second reason was the 30-second breaks in games for huddles, stoppages, etc. Burke and Jones both saw opportunities for messages and advertisements that could help support what the league was paying to broadcast the games.
But in Burke's mind, his third reason was the most important.
"If you tried to come up with all of the soap operas in-season and out of season, and all these makeup of these teams and these players and coaches, and if you will owners, if you tried to produce this soap operas in Hollywood, you'd have to have a thousand producers and you probably couldn't get 'em," Jones said.
"[Burke] said, 'What goes on around football year-round promotes it for the games themselves. When I make a movie at ABC, I have to spend as much to promote it as I do to make it.' Consequently, that's what you do. NFL football promotes itself year-round … As a matter of fact, a little controversy is better than the alternative. Not real serious, but certainly enough to debate. Best advice I ever had, and I've used it to this day."
Making the NFL "Bigger Than Life"
In the beginning of the NFL's days on television in the 1970s and 80s, there were only three networks that broadcast games: ABC, CBS and NBC, known as "The Big Three."
As time went along, that list grew. ESPN joined in on the fun in 1987, and TNT in 1990. Jones bought the Cowboys in 1989 and has discussed at length over the course of his career how much of a gamble it was financially for him to do so. When he began to get involved with the NFL, the league was in a similar financial situation as its television partners.
"The networks came to the NFL and wanted to reduce the rights fees, and extend that reduction for two, possibly three years," Jones recalled. "And that was going to reduce the right fees by several million dollars a year to each club. And of course, I had just gotten in and I was losing as much as a million a month in cashflow. So, I called and talked to – and I was almost desperate – but I hustled and I talked to several of the owners and said, 'We can't vote for this.'"
The proposition had been brought to then-Browns owner Art Modell, who chaired the NFL's television committee at the time, a man Jones labeled "our television guru." Already losing money, Jones was the leader of the group opposed to the networks' proposition so that he wouldn't lose any more.
At the time, all items brought to a vote before the league's owners needed 75% of the vote to pass. Jones got to work and was able to rally the necessary eight votes at the time, unsure of what came afterwards.
"I didn't have an idea of where we would go, but I sure wanted to stop it," Jones said. "And of course, when that was successful, and I did get it stopped, [former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue] came to me and said, 'Okay, big boy, Jerry. You've got it in your mind of something different, so you just get on the TV committee.' And I said, 'Well, I have had very little experience in television. I'll get on it, but I haven't have any idea about what to do.' But I knew I didn't want to do that, and that is let the networks off the hook for a couple of years at a higher price."
Jones ended up joining the league's TV committee. Self-admittedly, Jones was not as qualified as some of the other individuals involved, but he drew on some of his previous business expenditures in Little Rock, Ark. for an idea.
"I had sat in several meetings when I owned my interest in Channel 4 in Little Rock, and I remember paying an outrageous amount for "I Love Lucy."" Jones recalled.
The I Love Lucy Theory
Originally airing in 1951, I Love Lucy was an American sitcom that aired 180 half-hour episodes over six years, four of which they spent as the most-watched show in the United States.
"When I Love Lucy came out, it was the biggest smash yet, it was like the NFL. Everybody in America watched I Love Lucy," Jones said. "Well, they then had the original shows, and then this was the reruns – and the reruns were outrageous in price compared to what you could pay for programming. And there was no way financially that a station of which I owned could pay that kind of price for it."
So, Jones went to his competitor, the local CBS station in Little Rock who had bought and run some of I Love Lucy's programming on its airwaves. When he asked how the station was able to pay for it, Jones' competitor reminded him of a popular term from his grocery background: a loss-leader.
"A loss-leader is when you sell something too cheap or you give people a good buy on it so that they'll come through the door and will buy other stuff," Jones explained.
Jones' competitor gave him three reasons, similar to Burke, why he should invest in airing the hit show. The first reason surrounded advertising.
"If you're going to get I Love Lucy and your advertising on my station, you're going to buy programming at 11 o'clock at night and you're going to buy programming at three in the afternoon," Jones explained. "And so you're going to buy additional things if you're the one that gets to buy an ad on I Love Lucy."
That led to the second reason, which was the show brought more substance to the station. And last, but certainly not least, airing the show gave the station a better chance to have an increase in viewers that stuck around to watch the stations' programming after I Love Lucy concluded.
With all of that combined, Jones envisioned the NFL following a similar model, and took his idea to the league's TV committee.
"We shouldn't be something you make money off of if you're a network, we should be a loss-leader and we bring other things credibility, other people being on the station, staying on the station, and they should have to do other things that are great for the station if they're going to have I Love Lucy. It's not just the fee," Jones said.
"Well, from that point on, I was kind of known as the I Love Lucy theory guy. But I said, 'We need to become the NFL of all those networks, we need to become the I Love Lucy of this present-time in sports."
One Billion Dollars … Annually
In 1992, Commissioner Tagliabue invited Jones to sit in on the league's negotiations with television broadcast networks. Up to that point, Jones knew that there were millions of eyeballs and fans surrounding the game of football, but that the league was solely generating interest, not profiting off of it.
"It had great effect spreading the interest, and of course throughout broadcast, radio, television and the people involved in it, but it did not have a structure to bring enough juice back home to go again. And consequently, all sports were losing money," Jones said. "And if they had financial support, it was more charitable. It was more a hobby, and I couldn't find anybody that had a model that would self-support, even with the fans coming to the stadiums."
In going to work in finding it, Jones was inspired by Rupert Murdoch, former chairman of the FOX Network, for making an aggressive offer and outbidding CBS for the rights to the NFC's exclusive coverage in 1993.
"[Murdoch] saw that what it was today was not what it was. It could be more. It could be a lot more," Jones said. "And so when he stepped up and made his bid, it did nothing but buoy me. It made me look around and say, 'Man, if that's the way that people can put together the interest in the NFL and create networks, then we can, apart from those networks and that broadcasting, we can do that several places. We can make it bigger than life.'"
In 1994, the NFL made north of one billion dollars annually on their television rights deals for the first time in league history, with FOX's $395 million annual contribution leading the way. In Jones' eyes, that investment changed the entire trajectory of the league, and also the venues that NFL games are now played in.
"That's how you got new stadiums," Jones said. "And that's why those stadiums became beyond anything that anybody could have ever imagined. It's because each part of it, the broadcasting, were determined to make the game be shown to millions of people. The stadium and the type of stadiums and the Taj Mahals that we ended up building, they were there to be what that type of broadcasting commitment deserved."
Jones built his Taj Mahal, AT&T Stadium, which cost $1.3 billion and opened in 2009. Jones said he could've paid 50% less if he wanted to, but didn't because of how much he believed could be made off the broadcast from his new state-of-the-art football cathedral.
"I certainly wanted a place for the hundred-thousand people that come, but what I also wanted was a place for the 30 million people watching so that John Madden and Al Michaels and people like that could say, 'Folks, you ought to be here. You ought to walk in this place. You meet off the floor. It's a fabulous experience.'" Jones said.
Fast forward to the present day, and the NFL's last television rights deal was signed for a grand total of $111 billion between six networks, young and old. Jones never would've imagined that his ideas, and those of his counterparts, would get them to where they are now.
"No, I did not have a limit or a goal. I did not have that…" Jones said. "But I could sense that there was more here than we had experienced. But I knew that I had to go to work and go to work hard to do things like we did with the contract when we did it with Murdoch."
Jones' Close Relationship with the Media
In a current media climate where NFL players, coaches and executives can sometimes be hesitant or resistant to speaking with the media, Jones has always been the polar opposite.
From speaking to reporters after games at home or on the road to weekly radio shows, Jones sees value in and enjoys being asked the hard questions and leaving himself open to scrutiny.
"It was very purposely an activity that had purpose," Jones said when asked what entices him to connect more with the media. "I thought that a lot of my perspective, since it was a combination of management and ownership, just like [former Cowboys president and general manager] Tex Schramm from that perspective, I thought there was a lot of content."
"And if you will, in the case of a combination owner and GM, since professional sports is about financial, I thought there was a lot of the decisions that were being made at this level and it would make good, or certainly controversial content, for sports fans. And so, I have purposely done that."
As he begins his time in the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, he now gets to do so with a close friend of his: the late John Madden.
Back in 2010, Madden received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 31st annual Sports Emmys. There to present him with the award was NBC Universal Sports and Olympics Chairman Dick Ebersol and Jones, who will never forget that night.
"I remember it [like it was yesterday]," Jones said. "I've gotten to present Michael Irvin and Emmitt Smith and Gil Brandt and Larry Allen, who I believe to be icons as players, and certainly John Madden has no peer as far as a substantive personality of the NFL. It was such a privilege to be asked to join Dick Ebersol … When we were asked to do that for John Madden and by John, it was one of my most cherished nights."
Just one year later, Jones would present Ebersol with his induction to the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, the same prestigious hall that he will be in for eternity.
