Surprisingly, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and former NFL head coach Dan Reeves weren’t able to work out the terms of an agreement pursuant to which Reeves would have worked for the team.
Not surprisingly, Jones and Reeves have given conflicting explanations for the impasse.
Jones told ESPN Radio 103.3 in Dallas that the breakdown arose from the “time element” of the relationship.
“We may not be on the same page regarding the type of commitment that we’re talking about here,” Jones said.
But Reeves has said that he was more than willing to put in whatever time was necessary to do the job right.
“I fully intended and told them that I would work,” Reeves said, according to Tim MacMahon of the Dallas Morning News. “It was a full-time job. A full-time job to me means that you work as long as it takes to get the job done.”
In an appearance on Sirius NFL Radio’s Movin’ the Chains with Pat Kirwan and Tim Ryan, Reeves said that he walked after Jones made unexpected changes to Reeves’ contract on Wednesday.
“I flew out [to Dallas] on Monday and actually started doing some work, meeting with the offensive coaches, with Jason Garrett, trying to go over some stuff with them and trying to learn the terminology and see if I could help out as we were evaluating the running game,” Reeves said. “And [I was] still meeting with Jerry [Jones], trying to work out what the title would be, et cetera, and work out some of the details of the contract.
“And really on Tuesday [I] thought we had it done and then on Wednesday, yesterday afternoon, some things were in the contract that I wasn’t comfortable with and that Jerry felt was important to him and so we decided that if we both weren’t going to be comfortable with it we shouldn’t proceed further. So we ended the conversation.”
Though Reeves still hasn’t specifically identified the things that gave him concern, it appears that he was turned off by language requiring him to perform whatever duties the head coach (Wade Phillips) or the G.M. (Jones) might assign to Reeves.
“[I]f you are going to be answering to the head coach and the general manager . . . you assume that wouldn’t have to be in the contract,” Reeves said. “I was going to answer to the general manager and the head coach. I was going to do anything that they wanted me to do and those things had been gone over with and so forth. It’s just something, like I said, in 29 years that I’d been in coaching I never had any language like that in my contract. And that didn’t come up until the last minute.”
It sounds to us that Reeves developed a gut-level concern that he possibly would be screwed at some point down the line, if he’d signed the contract. So he acted on his instincts and opted not to take the leap of faith.
Though the parting is being peddled as amicable, we think that a deal didn’t get accomplished here because, at a fundamental level, Reeves simply didn’t trust Jones.