When the Cowboys were getting blown out at home by the Packers, seemingly hundreds of football fans on Twitter posted the same prediction at the same time. Jerry Jones is going to hire Bill Belichick.
To employ the former Patriots coach, who officially cut ties with New England on Wednesday, Jones would first have to fire Mike McCarthy, Dallas’ current coach. McCarthy was presumed to be sitting on a hot seat even before the game and the embarrassing nature of the Cowboys’ loss won’t help his cause.
Jones said “he hasn’t thought about it” when asked after the game on Sunday.
But the Belichick speculation isn’t idle. Jones has been thinking about him for almost 30 years.
In an interview with a Dallas sports station in 2019, Jones mentioned meeting Belichick by chance in 1995 at a ski resort in Colorado.
“There was a line and I’m sitting in the back and somebody bumps up against me a few times and I turn around and there was this guy that I couldn’t make (out who he was) because he had his ski stuff on and goggles and raised up and it was Bill,” Jones said on Tuesday. “He no longer had a job, he had been with Cleveland and they let him go up there. He said, ‘I can coach if you ever get an opportunity, don’t forget about me.’ And I thought about that many times. You never know when you can find a great coach. You can find him in a ski checkout line sometimes.”
Belichick confirmed the conversation, although he hinted that maybe Jones didn’t quite have the dialogue verbatim.
“I don’t know if I quite remember it the way Jerry described it,” Belichick told reporters when asked about Jones’ comments. “But he’s probably got a better memory than I do. But no, we were out at Snowmass and it was kind of the end of the day and, you know, picking the kids up from ski school and whatever. Can’t beat Snowmass.
“I was out there with the family, and Jerry, he’s got on a big white jacket with a blue star, coming off a couple Super Bowl victories out there. But yeah, Jerry and the Jones’ have always been great to me, always had a great relationship with them.”
Belichick praised Jones again ahead of playing the Cowboys in September.
“I have a ton of respect for Jerry and Stephen (Jones), and the way they run the organization down there. They’ve had decades of success. They were really the team of the 90s with Jimmy (Johnson) and they’ve been good. They’ve been competitive every year, obviously more than competitive. They’ve had a lot of great players down there. Tony (Romo) had a great run. Those are great years there with Tony, Coach (Bill) Parcells. We played them here in the early 2000s, but I always keep an eye on them, just the way they do things.
“They’ve gotten a lot of players that they’ve gotten a lot of production from that I’d say aren’t big name players – free agents, guys that they dig out down there. I think their scouting staff does a good job,” Belichick continued. “They’re very experienced. Almost all of their scouts have been with the Cowboys their entire career, so they home-grow them and they learn their system. I think they manage their personnel really well. Stephen kind of runs that with their personnel department, but, I mean, very consistent organization. They show up every week, every year pretty good. So, I have a ton of respect for them, definitely watch what they do and how they do it and try to learn from it.”
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