Hands-On Success Story : Pro football: Jones, owner of Cowboys, has day-to-day control while Johnson wins with hands-off style.

For at least the last 50 years, two NFL truths have seemed self-evident:

--Any smart businessman can become a winning club owner if he learns the business and gives it the same time and attention that made him a success in other fields.

--It takes an owner with a solid understanding of pro football to hire the right pro football people. Or, it takes a lot of luck. Owning an NFL team is usually an embarrassment for those who don’t know enough about football to supervise those who think they do.

In this league, in other words, the road to success is precisely the same as it is in any other business.

If some owners don’t know that, some do, and Jerry Jones clearly does. The day he bought the Dallas Cowboys three years ago, Jones hired a new president and general manager--Jerry Jones.

“I moved my residence (from Arkansas) to Dallas, and moved my desk into the (team’s) front office,” he said this week. “And I’ve been here ever since. Although I still have my (oil, gas and other) businesses, I spend 100% of my management time on the Cowboys.”

The results have been startling, especially since when so many other NFL teams are still scraping bottom:

--In 1989, when Jones was striving to learn the details and nuances of pro football, the Cowboys finished 1-15.

--In 1990, when he learned a bit more, they were 7-9.

--This year, they are already 10-5 and back in the playoffs for the first time since 1985, when the franchise crashed after a brilliant quarter-century with Hall of Fame co-pilots Tex Schramm and Tom Landry.

“This has been a fun year, but I’m not really celebrating, (because) it was fun the first year, too,” Jones said. “Having made the decision to be completely involved, I’ve enjoyed watching things work out all along.”

He promises to consider celebrating soon after the turn of the century.

“Our goals were set for us by Texas sports fans when we came to the Cowboys,” he said. “How do you improve on Tex and Landry? Our fans expect us to maintain the great traditions of this historic franchise today, tomorrow, next year, and from one decade to the next.”

And those doing the maintenance work appear to be another Tex-and-Landry combination. They are J.J. and J.J.--Jones and Coach Jimmy Johnson.

Thirty years ago, Jones and Johnson were college roommates and starting linemen on an Arkansas football team that finished No. 1 in 1964.

These days, as the only NFL owner who has played on a national championship team, Jones makes the calls in the Cowboy front office--supervising the draft and other personnel activities, as Schramm once did--while Johnson replaces Landry on the practice field.

The styles of the “J’s” though, are strikingly dissimilar.

Jones is very much the hands-on leader.

“We never make a (personnel) decision without consulting everybody from finance people to (assistant coaches),” he said. “But, hey, the buck stops here, in this office.”

Johnson, by contrast, is a chairman-of-the-board type who, his players say, doesn’t even draw up game plans for the Cowboys, offensive or defensive.

Asked to compare Johnson and Landry as coaches, veteran Dallas football writer Frank Luksa said: “I’ve never seen Johnson coach.”

He added, by way of comparison: “Landry could get down in the dirt and help a player in any position with any technique, and often did.”

Although Johnson limits his practice-day contributions to approving the plans of his assistants, it was he who hired the assistants--the Rams’ former offensive coordinator, Norv Turner, among them--and who sets the club’s tone and philosophy.

As Luksa said, Johnson earned coach-of-the-year distinction this fall in only two days of work--let alone what he did the rest of the time. First, Johnson advised the Cowboys to jump all over the otherwise undefeated Redskins in Washington. Then he showed them how to beat the Eagle defense in Philadelphia.

Beyond much question, the best thing Jones has done for the Cowboys is hire Johnson, who accompanies him to most NFL meetings and serves as the owner’s most trusted adviser. And they are alike in one conspicuous way: Both emphasize aggressiveness.

Johnson couldn’t have upset the Redskins with any other approach.

Meanwhile, in the front office, it is Jones’ aggressiveness, supplementing Johnson’s, that has built the team. If Johnson is coach of the year, Jones is the NFL’s executive of the year.

As president and general manager, he is averaging, for example, 10 trades a year, about nine more than Schramm averaged. As the owner, Jones willingly spent $1 million one season on 16 Plan B free agents.

“Some of it was wasted,” he said. “You can’t go after new players aggressively without making mistakes.”

It is Jones’ theory that nobody enjoys, or succeeds in, football except risk-takers.

“The Herschel Walker trade was risky,” he said. “It may not seem so now, but it sure was then. We took a lot of criticism, because Herschel was a great young player. We were even criticized for the Steve Beuerlein trade.”

The risk has rewarded the Cowboys with the league’s youngest good team.

“We average just over 26 years, but that’s misleading,” Jones said. “We have four or five good old veterans who bring the average up. The exciting thing is that the young guys aren’t just playing, they’re contributing.”

The thing that makes this exciting, Jones said, is that he has been pointing for the NFL since his days at Arkansas.

“I’ve had this lifelong ambition to own an NFL team,” he said. “And I could probably have owned one earlier. But until (lately), I couldn’t (afford) to take off and run it myself. And if you’re going to think about winning, I think you have to run it.”

He seems to be proving that.