At a time when his own starting quarterback is getting close to a return, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones still can’t get Johnny Manziel off his mind.
The topic of the former Texas A&M quarterback came up again this week on Jones’ radio show, and make no mistake, Jones still sounds wistful about letting Manziel get away.
Though they’re staring at a top-10 pick at the moment, one of the hosts on KRLD offered that the Cowboys might not be picking high enough to land an eventual replacement for injured Tony Romo, Jones butted in.
“Except if a great one, Roethlisberger or Manziel, falls,” Jones said, via Steve Doerschuk of the Canton Repository.
Ben Roethlisberger went 11th overall to the Steelers in 2004. Manziel was still on the clock at 16 in 2014, when the Cowboys were picking.
“We had Manziel at the top of our board, (still) on the board,” Jones said. “So he’s a legitimate board pick and we’re sitting there and grinding through, . . . should we go for this opportunity to take a quarterback that high that’s dropped down and start getting ready in case for when Romo is not here or God forbid if he got hurt? That’s why I sat there to the last minute and stared at everybody and looked at everybody so that we could say, ‘Is this that shot? One has dropped to us?’
“Now you can ‘hindsight’ and look at how things have gone in Cleveland, but still that’s exactly why we sat there and had the agony.”
Instead, the Cowboys took guard Zach Martin, who has started 24 straight games since then, and Manziel has yet to establish himself as one of the great ones.
Jones admitted it would have been hard drafting Manziel to stash him, since Romo had just signed a huge contract extension. Of course, with his team losing six straight games without Romo on the sidelines and Brandon Weeden and Matt Cassel on the field, you also understand why Jones’ mind wanders.