Mark Schlereth: Cowboys are ‘Jaguars with better marketing’

With the America’s Team docuseries recently premiering, to go with messy contract negotiations happening between owner Jerry Jones and star pass-rusher Micah Parsons, the Dallas Cowboys are the talk of the NFL right now. And during an appearance on The Dan Patrick Show, Fox Sports NFL analyst Mark Schlereth didn’t exactly have glowing things to say about the organization.

Schlereth told host Dan Patrick that the Cowboys are “the Jacksonville Jaguars with better marketing.”

Mark Schlereth: “They are the Jacksonville Jaguars with better marketing. That’s what the Dallas Cowboys are.” #NFL

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The conversation began with Patrick asking Schlereth, “When does the Micah Parsons situation get your full attention?”

“When he starts missing games,” Schlereth responded. “This is so standard for Jerry Jones; the standard operating procedure, when it comes to Micah Parsons. You wait until the last second to get your quarterback done, Dak Prescott. You wait until the last second to get your wide receiver done, CeeDee Lamb. The bottom line is this is the way they operate as a business.

“But this is also the reason that things have gone awry,” Schlereth continued. “Why you haven’t won a Divisional Round game since 1995. Because if you do it to these guys, it creates a locker room full of, in my opinion, independent contractors. If you’re going to take your stars, and you’re going to rake them over the coals, and you’re going to essentially give out some fake money contracts and report that Dak Prescott is going to be the highest-paid guy in the history of football. And some of the details in there are faulty, and he turns it down- well, you turn your fanbase against your players, your players look at the management and say, ‘What are we doing here?’

“You knew [Micah Parsons] was a bona fide superstar from his rookie year. And the fact that you wait, and you wait, and you wait, it keeps you out of free agency, it keeps you out of doing the things that you need to do as a football franchise to have a legitimate chance, in my opinion, to win a championship.”

“It’s just the Dallas Cowboy way,” Schlereth added. “I said it on [The Stinkin’ Truth Podcast]- they are the Jacksonville Jaguars with better marketing. That’s what the Dallas Cowboys are.”

Patrick then asked Schlereth, “If [Jerry Jones] had actually relinquished the GM job, would they have won championships in the last 30 years?”

“Yeah, because I think they’ve done a great job drafting, I think they are a really good football team, but there’s more to it than that,” Schlereth said. “When your owner is the guy that’s circumventing the authority of the coach or the people that are in place, eventually that comes back to bite you. And ultimately, for them, it’s bitten them in the playoffs. Those things, you know, it’s hard to quantify, and it’s hard to put numbers on it.

“But I’m just telling you- when you have a back staircase to the owner’s office, and if you don’t like something going on within the organization as a player, you can go up there and talk to them about it, that is not the way the structure is supposed to happen in an NFL franchise. And eventually it bites you.”

While the Cowboys’ Week 1 game against the Philadelphia Eagles will open the 2025 NFL season on NBC, Schlereth will fittingly be in the Fox broadcast booth for the Jaguars’ season opener against the Carolina Panthers in Jacksonville.