During halftime of the Dallas Cowboys’ embarrassing loss to the Green Bay Packers on Sunday, legendary former Dallas head coach Jimmy Johnson teed off on the team. The Fox panelist delivered an impassioned speech that would have been fitting for the actual Cowboys locker room. And on Monday, Johnson’s old quarterback Troy Aikman explained why Johnson’s words were so powerful.
The halftime rant was “as upset” as Aikman had seen Johnson since their Dallas days, he said in an interview on The Stephen A. Smith Show.
“A lot of times on television, as we know, we see analysts that will react, and it’s really for show,” Aikman said. “This was as upset as I’ve seen Jimmy … since I played for him.”
Many will point out that in his older age, Johnson has tamed the temper he was known for as a coach. But Aikman saw it come out during the halftime rant.
“I always kid him for the fact that he’s changed over the years, and he’s not as intense,” Aikman told Smith. “But that intensity that we saw as players when he was our coach, that’s what America saw in his halftime talk to the team. He meant it.
A close observer as both a football analyst and media critic, Aikman could tell Johnson wasn’t messing around based on how he reacted to his Fox teammate.
“When [Michael] Strahan reacted to him the way that he did, thinking Jimmy was half-joking, I could tell there was no joking about it,” Aikman explained. “He was serious, he was as embarrassed I think by the performance up to that point in that ballgame as any one of those coaches would have been.”
Strahan mocked getting into a three-point stance to go to war for Johnson. And the former coach exclaimed again, “It’s embarrassing!”
If anyone can decode Johnson, it’s his former quarterback. Aikman felt how deeply the anger from Johnson ran even through a screen. And rightly so, after another Dallas postseason collapse.
[The Stephen A. Smith Show on YouTube]
