Jerry Jones, Deion Sanders, and the Limits of Integration
In 1995, just a few years into the modern free agency system in the NFL, Deion Sanders became one of the league's first marquee free agents. Sanders was already making a case to be the best cornerback in NFL history, and he was a difference-maker for contending teams: The previous year, he’d signed with San Francisco, and the 49ers promptly won their first Super Bowl since trading Joe Montana.
But it wasn’t just the on-field production: Deion was an off-field superstar. He was Prime Time. He’d hosted Saturday Night Live. He’d released a rap album.
And so it made sense for football’s most natural star to be on football’s most prominent franchise. He was supposedly offered more money to play for other teams, but the opportunity to play for the Dallas Cowboys (who embraced using him on offense as well, which was important to Deion) was too good to pass up.
Plus, it wasn’t like the Cowboys were going to underpay him: They offered him a seven-year, $35 million contract, which made him the highest-paid defensive player in NFL history. The deal also included a signing bonus, which was initially reported to be worth $13 million. But later it was revealed to be only $12,999,999. Why the change?
Because Jerry Jones thought 13 was unlucky, and Jerry Jones gets what he wants.
Jerry Jones has had an outsized influence on the league ever since he bought the Cowboys back in 1989, and he has attracted controversy because of it. From his very first act as the team’s owner — firing their legendary coach, Tom Landry, and hiring his old college teammate, Jimmy Johnson, to replace him — Jones has attracted media attention. It’s a position he has actively courted, to be honest. He clearly relishes being the central figure of the NFL’s most famous — and most polarizing — team.
He has never relinquished his General Manager title in the 33 years since he bought the team, even when that power struggle forced out his old friend Johnson, who had built Jones a dynasty. When people accuse Jones of being the NFL’s “shadow commissioner,” he barely denies it. He just can’t help himself, and so fans have come to know Jones way more than they know most team owners.
His love for being the center of attention was on display again last month in the Washington Post: The paper asked all 32 NFL owners to discuss the league’s record on race… and Jones was the only one who agreed to talk.
If you didn’t read that story, you probably at least heard about the above photo that ran with it, which includes young Jerry Jones on the steps of North Little Rock High School, where Jones was a student when the picture was taken in 1957, with a group of other white students intent on blocking six Black students who wanted to integrate the school. Because of that photo, many people have construed the article as an attempt to “cancel” Jerry Jones.
This is unfortunate, because the article is actually an attempt to reckon with how Jones’ racial views have evolved, and the influence they have had on the NFL since 1989 — which was not only the year Jones bought the Cowboys, but also happened to be the year Art Shell became the first Black head coach in the modern NFL. The Cowboys are one of 13 teams to have never hired a Black head coach, or a minority coach of any kind, and the Post story paints a nuanced, if not entirely flattering, portrait of Jones.
But Jones’ love of the spotlight cuts two ways. On the one hand, Jones is admirably candid in the story. He admits frankly that he has hired his head coaches based on personal connections, saying “It’s not the X’s and O’s… It’s who you know.” This is obviously true throughout the league, and especially in the case of Jones, who has hired his former college teammate, his former college coach, and the son of his former scouting director. But acknowledging it — and recognizing how that fact undermines the entire premise of the Rooney Rule, as I’ve written — is important to realizing why the league has not hired more Black head coaches.
Throughout the story, Jones is willing to acknowledge his own shortcomings and the league’s in the area of racial progress.
On the other hand, Jones loves the spotlight so much that he can’t help but see himself as the hero of his own story. When discussing how to diversify the NFL, his only suggestions are that Black coaches should be more like himself — that they should be industrious go-getters who “see around the corner”:
“It’s not, you sit and wait on the phone to ring. That is not the way it works… The guys that I have seen that have gotten the most out of putting the cowboy hat on and being in the NFL have also been the same guys that are looking around the corner to kind of find every edge they can.”
It never seems to dawn on Jones that he is able to “find every edge” because he is the beneficiary of an unfair system — and that other people don’t have access to the opportunities he has.
There’s a story in the article about Jones trying to motivate members of the league’s new Accelerator program — a program for minority coaches and executives to meet the owners — by telling a story from his early days in the oil and gas business in the 1970s. In order to close a deal with another company, whose CEO loved golf, Jones called up his old college football coach and asked him to take the CEO for a round of golf at Augusta National Golf Club. That was supposed to be an example of how to “find every edge”; he did not seem to appreciate the irony of the fact that Augusta did not even allow Black members until 1990. Surely Jones knows that, and is aware in a general sort of way that Black people do not have the same opportunities as white people. But he is unable to make the connection to his own experience, and to acknowledge that his own success might not be due to his ability to “look around corners,” but to the fact that he had a rich dad and a lot of connections.
In the same kind of way, he may have been generally aware of the efforts to integrate North Little Rock High School — and seen it, as he says, as “a curious thing” — but he seems unwilling to honestly accept the implications. The failure to integrate a school means some people can’t attend, means some people won’t graduate, means some people won’t go to college… and eventually means that some people don’t have college buddies they can call up when they need to play a round of golf at some famous, exclusive, snooty, racist golf course.
The integration effort at North Little Rock in 1957 was, of course, part of a wave of protests that followed the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, in which the Supreme Court famously held that “separate can never be equal.” But the push for desegregation only came after decades of attempts to build Black institutions commensurate with whites-only institutions were quashed.
Many of the cases that paved the way for Brown involved situations where there simply was no school for Black students to attend. In 1935, Donald Gaines Murray was rejected from the University of Maryland’s law school on account of his race, even though there was no public law school in the state that admitted Black students. In 1948, the Black high school in Hearne, Texas burned down, and rather than build a new one, the school district proposed teaching Black students in an old, dilapidated army barracks. Indeed, it was only after decades of the Jim Crow South making clear that it had no intention of honoring the “equal” part of “separate but equal” that the push for desegregation finally won out.
Something that did emerge in the century between the end of slavery and Brown were the historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.* HBCUs played a crucial role in building a Black middle class in the years after slavery, not to mention minting most of the leaders of the civil rights movement (W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Bayard Rustin, Thurgood Marshall, and John Lewis, to name just a few, all attended an HBCU). To this day, there are over 300,000 students enrolled at HBCUs every year.
*There were, technically, a couple of HBCUs that existed before the Civil War, but the trend really took off after Emancipation.
Despite their importance, HBCUs face the same challenges that plague — and often doom — all Black institutions in the US. First, there was a lack of money. Schools founded to educate freed slaves were obviously not going to have a wealthy donor base to draw from, and so HBCUs were initially dependent on the benevolence of white donors, making them beholden to a kind of paternalistic, nonthreatening philosophy.
But that’s only part of the story. The other issue that Black institutions face is that their talent is raided by white institutions. We saw this last year with our series on baseball’s integration: Once a Black business or school proves there is talent to be had or money to be made by serving Black people, then white businesses and schools with more power or money or prestige, will quickly follow them and push them out.
And we see this with HBCU football. For a while, in the 1970s and ‘80s, HBCUs were a major source of talent for the NFL. Strong arguments can be made that the best all-time wide receiver (Jerry Rice), best all-time running back (Walter Payton), and the best all-time defensive end (Deacon Jones), all went to HBCUs. You can also throw in a Super Bowl MVP (Doug Williams), two defensive players of the year (Michael Strahan and Mel Blount), and a bunch of other Hall of Famers. It’s a pretty good list.
But as higher education has opened to nonwhite students, the pipeline has narrowed. A couple years ago, USA Today listed the 100 greatest football players from HBCUs, and only seven were drafted since the year 2000. It has simply become less common for Black college students to opt for HBCUs, and so it is no longer seen as the place to find the most talented Black players.
Which is why it was such an encouraging surprise when Deion Sanders chose to take the head coaching job at Jackson State in the fall of 2020. Sanders immediately brought a new level of excitement and legitimacy to the Southwestern Athletic Conference. Part of that was his fame — but that couldn’t really explain all of it. After all, other than a mostly forgettable comeback with Baltimore, Deion was out of the league by 2000, before most college students were even born.
But Deion also brought his confidence, and his ability to generate enthusiasm. He’s Coach Prime, after all. And he immediately started to treat Jackson State like a serious place for top-tier talent. He got games on TV and got ESPN to come to a SWAC game and NFL scouts to come to Jackson State practices. And soon top-tier talent was coming to play for him.
And, of course, immediately Power Five schools noticed. Now, just a little over two years after he was first hired, Coach Prime has left for Colorado. For the last couple decades, Colorado has been mostly an afterthought in the college football landscape. The Buffaloes haven’t won a bowl game since 2004, and have only even been bowl-eligible four times since then (and that’s counting once in the Covid-shortened 2020 season). Deion Sanders also has no ties to Colorado: He’s from Florida, went to Florida State, and played professionally in Atlanta, San Francisco, Dallas, Washington, and Baltimore. He coached high school football in Texas and college football in Mississippi.
But Colorado has two things that Jackson State cannot match: money and power. Jackson State is a public school in a state that is not known for funding higher education. Plus, it takes its commitment to serving poorer students seriously — it was the only Mississippi state school that didn’t try to raise tuition this year. And so it faces perpetual budget challenges, meaning it cannot compete with the money a Pac-12 school like Colorado makes.
It’s not just the $5 million salary Colorado can offer Deion — it’s the resources and stability the school can provide. Coach Prime had to hustle to bring ESPN to the SWAC for one game; the Pac-12 is currently negotiating a major TV deal with both ESPN and Amazon. With that money comes the second piece: power. Because as a member of the Pac-12, Colorado has a direct say in how college football develops. Playoff expansion, bowl rights, NIL reforms, and so many other NCAA rules and policies happen with only the major conferences at the table. And now Deion has a seat at that table.
He just had to give up the one he held at Jackson State…
Which brings us back to Jerry Jones, and the steps of North Little Rock High. Because 65 years after those six Black students showed up on those steps, success at institutions run by Blacks is still graded on a curve. Sure you can coach at Jackson State, but can you win at a Power Five? Sure you can hit in the Negro leagues, but can you do it in the Majors? Sure you can get good grades at Howard, but can you do it at Harvard? Success doesn’t count as success unless you do it with white people around, unless you do it where the money and the power are.
And that means trying to impress people like Jerry Jones. The hope with integration was that once schools and jobs and everything else was opened up to all races, then success would fall on whoever most deserved it. There would be no reason to deny anyone what they had earned just because of their skin color. To a degree, this has of course been true, and sports is a great illustration of its success: When we have objective measures of success, athletes of all backgrounds are, generally, judged on their abilities.
But Jones’ example shows just how silly that hope is everywhere else. The role of “merit” in life outcomes is, sadly, pretty small compared to connections, random chance, and whether your boss thinks 13 is an unlucky number. Jones is honest about that, but refuses to accept the implications that come with it.
A common reaction to stories about the civil rights movement is to talk about how far we’ve come since then, and then make some trite comment about the work left to do. How bad things were back then, how much better they are now, and how good they will be… one day. At times, the Post story follows that same narrative about Jones himself. He used to blind to racial matters, now he is paying attention, and maybe he will be better… some day.
But why is the world condemned to wait around for some 80-year-old jerk to finally learn about racism and do the right thing? Because he is an owner. Jones is not being singled out because he’s the worst person in that photo — he’s being singled out because he’s the only one in the photo who owns the Dallas Cowboys. The power he has because of his class position is enormous. It doesn’t matter that his sins are mild or his character flaws common, because an entire league — an entire football-watching country, really — is beholden to them.
Since the 1960s, integration’s progress has crashed upon the power of the ownership class. The Rooney Rule is doomed to fail for the exact reasons Jones says: Owners hire who they want. You can either change that, or get stuck with the world owners leave for you.