an interview with Dale Hansen<\/a> that it\u2019s still incredible to him that the Cowboys haven\u2019t been to the NFC Championship Game, let along the Super Bowl, since that 1995 season.<\/p>\n\u201cI didn\u2019t think it was the last one that I\u2019d be a part of. I thought we would certainly win another one. I thought I would,\u201d Aikman said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to fathom. It really is. Because we see it, we talk every year about parity, and we\u2019ve seen teams go from last to first, and teams that have not been historically very good, they still make a run, they make it to a championship game or a Super Bowl, and yet for the Cowboys that hasn\u2019t happened. It\u2019s hard to put your finger on exactly why.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aikman believes it\u2019s unacceptable for the Cowboys to go three decades without a Lombardi Trophy, or even getting close to one.<\/p>\n
\u201cCowboys fans deserve better,\u201d Aikman said. \u201cI do know that. This is the Cowboys, the flagship franchise, and the fact that the Cowboys in 30 years have not made it to a championship game, let along a Super Bowl, it\u2019s hard to fathom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked if Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is to blame, Aikman acknowledged that Jones making himself the Cowboys\u2019 general manager is a big part of it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt all does start at the top. Good or bad, it starts at the top. I don\u2019t think Jerry would shy away from that,\u201d Aikman said. \u201cYou have to take responsibility when it doesn\u2019t work out, and it hasn\u2019t worked out. I\u2019ve heard Jerry say the reason he hasn\u2019t hired a general manager is there are no guarantees and no one can guarantee him that making a change at GM and replacing himself would guarantee that they\u2019d be any better. But if that\u2019s your philosophy, then you\u2019d never fire the head coach either. You\u2019d never make any changes because there are no guarantees whatsoever. They\u2019ve been going down this road so long and yet it hasn\u2019t translated to success in January. There has to be a reason for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aikman said any team that has had the Cowboys\u2019 playoff record should make changes.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo me, you have to make changes in how you\u2019re doing it, if for three decades you haven\u2019t made an NFC Championship Game,\u201d Aikman said. \u201cIt\u2019s just unacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aikman said Jones knows that Jimmy Johnson did a great job building the Cowboys\u2019 1990s Super Bowl teams, but Jones hasn\u2019t given anyone else the kind of authority Johnson had.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe knows why we won with Jimmy Johnson, and I believe the reason we won is because every player in that locker room felt, and I think knew, that Jimmy was calling the shots, that Jimmy was in control of their destiny, so if you didn\u2019t do what you were supposed to do by Jimmy\u2019s standards, you were held accountable,\u201d Aikman said. \u201cHe was a great evaluator of talent, he drafted those players, he built those teams, he was a tremendous general manager \u2014 I say general manager, he was a tremendous evaluator of talent and in many ways he was the de facto general manager. I think he was probably better in that role than he was even as a head coach, as good as he was there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now Jones is the general manager, and has never found anything close to the success of the teams Johnson built.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Troy Aikman won his third Super Bowl with the Cowboys after the 1995 season, he never dreamed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":817066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-817065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/817066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}