There's no one else for Jerry Jones to yell at about the Cowboys

Jerry Jones appears to have reached a breaking point.

After the Dallas Cowboys lost by 38 points to the Detroit Lions on Sunday, the fourth straight time his team was steamrolled at home dating back to last year's playoffs, Jones became chippy with the hosts of a local radio show. Downright stroppy, even.

"This is not your job," he said in response to reasonable questions about the team's quiet offseason. "You really think you're gonna sit here with a microphone and tell me all of the things that I've done wrong without going over the rights?"

Meow.

The Cowboys owner later told The Athletic that he doesn't mind tough questions from fans but not from people "that (he's) paying." (Jones neither owns the radio station nor pays the hosts.)

The frustration, on one level, is understandable. The Cowboys are a bit of a mess. They are 30th in the NFL in points allowed - that would be third-last - and 19th in points scored, aided significantly there by quarterback Dak Prescott having to chuck it all over the place to try to climb out of all the big early-game holes. The running game is dead last in yards gained, and Prescott, who became the highest-paid player in NFL history on the eve of the season, is ranked 25th by QBR, ahead of two rookies, two journeymen, plus Will Levis and Deshaun Watson. But the kicking game is good, so there's that.

It's a state of affairs that would normally cause a cranky owner to fire his general manager, except for the complicating factor that the 82-year-old Jones also holds that position. He might lash out and punt the team's chief executive, but that happens to be his son, Stephen. The head coach, Mike McCarthy, is at least not a direct relation, but Jones has resisted calls to fire him for a couple of years now and appears committed to the bit.

Instead, it seems Jones will grit his teeth and see if the team he has constructed will manage to turn things around. That's a tough ask: After a bye this weekend, the 3-3 Cowboys play San Francisco, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Houston. More uncomfortable radio appearances are likely.

Jones at least deserves credit for owning it, in the figurative sense. Where some NFL owners prefer to do their meddling behind the scenes, as is reportedly the case with David Tepper in Carolina and was definitely the case with Daniel Snyder in Washington, Jones has embraced the burden of being responsible for all of his team's football decisions for decades now.

It just hasn't, you know, worked.

Since the Cowboys last won the Super Bowl in the 1995 season, two years after the messy breakup with former coach Jimmy Johnson, the team crafted by the Jones family has yet to make it back to even a conference championship game. Dallas has a 5-14 playoff record over that period, all while Jones has insisted that he's the best person to run the team and that it's silly that anyone would even begin to think otherwise.

A lot of GMs wouldn't survive three years of playoff futility, let alone three decades of it, and yet it isn't like the Jones-engineered Cowboys have been victimized by uncommon poor luck and unforeseeable flukes. No, he's just made more bad calls than good ones.

He gave a six-year, $90-million contract to running back Ezekiel Elliott in 2019, or right about the time the rest of the league had figured out that giving big-dollar second contracts to running backs was a bad idea. He stuck with Jason Garrett as head coach for almost 10 full seasons, during which the former Dallas quarterback won two playoff games. Garrett has notably not been employed as a head coach in the five years since being dismissed.

More recently, the billionaire owner has been schooled in contract negotiations by his own players, giving top-of-market deals to Prescott and receiver CeeDee Lamb - and in the case of the quarterback, twice in three years. Prescott is certainly an above-average passer, but by letting him reach the eve of his walk year without an extension in place, Jones was forced to pony up $240 million - and $231 million of that guaranteed - to the 31-year-old who has won two playoff games. While Jones can correctly brag that he's spent more money than anyone on their 2024 roster, the NFL's salary cap means this is actually a terrible idea.

Which gets back to the main point: Jones does the kind of things that usually get a GM run out of town. If he wasn't sure about Prescott as the quarterback of the future, he had plenty of time to consider alternatives. Instead, he just dawdled - just as he had done when Prescott was coming off his rookie deal - and ended up boxing himself into a costly corner with his quarterback. Twice!

The flaws elsewhere on the team are now showing, and Jones himself admitted that he might have gone for some kind of upgrade at running back if he had more cap room over the summer.

Instead, Elliott is back with the Cowboys and seeing significant playing time after signing a one-year, $2-million deal. Give Jones this: That's not an overpay.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.