THE NFL / BILL PLASCHKE : Share and Share Alike? Not Jones

The noogie that Dallas Cowboy owner Jerry Jones has been applying to the NFL’s crew cut has finally dented the consciousness of the average pro football fan, who has only two questions.

What, exactly, is Jones doing?

Why, exactly, is it so bad?

The league’s owners and players have been happy to explain.

Eddie DeBartolo, owner of the San Francisco 49ers, compared Jones to “a heroin addict.”

Pat Bowlen, owner of the Denver Broncos, said Jones is “motivated by greed.”

Brett Favre, Green Bay Packer quarterback, called Jones “a silly man with a lot of money.”

The first two comments are understandable. But when a guy who once bragged about “swapping spit” with a teammate on the sideline calls someone silly, it’s trouble.

The other owners’ anger was raised by two recent off-field transactions that will ultimately affect the league’s championship race as much any punt, pass or kick.

Jones recently announced that he had signed contracts that will bring him millions in sponsorship money from Pepsi and Nike.

Using that money, he has paid $40 million in bonuses to unsigned players since the end of last season.

This includes the $12.999-million bonus recently used to pry cornerback Deion Sanders, the league’s best defensive player, away from the 49ers.

So Jones cut a couple of deals, made a few bucks and bought some guys he feels will win him a championship.

So what, Jones says. Happened all the time in the oil business.

Shut your Texas trap, the NFL says.

The league has a rule forbidding individual teams from cutting sponsorship deals. The league does that sort of thing and splits the profits with the teams under its revenue-sharing plan.

That plan, by the way, is the reason the NFL has been the most successful sport in America for 2,131 consecutive days.

Ticket revenues are shared. Television revenues are shared. And all income from items that are sold bearing team logos is shared.

That’s the rule. And it works.

In the NFL, there is no talk of big-market/small-market disparity, as there is in baseball. Every year, the Green Bay Packers have a chance to win the Super Bowl.

The NFL teams also behave in such a consistent, unified manner that the teams remain bigger than the players, unlike in professional basketball. Joe Montana retires and interest is ever higher.

The league says Jones broke that rule.

He is not allowed to take money from Pepsi or Nike because the league already has a deal with Coca-Cola and several shoe companies, only one of which is Nike.

Jones said that he actually didn’t break the rule because Pepsi and Nike are, technically, sponsoring the Jones-owned Texas Stadium, not the Cowboys.

But besides, Jones said, the sponsorship portion of the rule stinks and needs to be changed.

He says that it is not fair that 24% of all NFL merchandise sold last year carried the Cowboys’ emblem, and that he received only one-twenty-eighth of the profits. (The expansion teams begin sharing this season.)

He says he and his staff should be rewarded for investing his own $140 million and working 18-hour days to return the Cowboys to their national glory while other teams receiving the same properties paycheck (about $3 million last year) sit around buying cheap players and threatening to change cities.

Jones is fighting to change what amounts to only 5% of all shared revenues. But he is fighting for it as if it were the last five steps to his house.

“We need to reward people for working,” he said. “We need to let some of these franchises control their own destiny. I love my colleagues, but they don’t wear my shoes. Not all of them have put as much on the line as I have.”

Paul Tagliabue, NFL commissioner, is worried that this attack on the merchandising income could lead to a declaration of war by Jones on the rest of revenue sharing, which accounts for 95% of each team’s income.

What if Jones decides he wants to cut his own television deal? After all, he was the driving force behind Fox’s winning bid of $1.4 billion for the last league agreement.

“Whether it is 10% of revenue or 1% of revenue, there is an element of unfairness here,” Tagliabue said. “Our revenue-sharing plan is one of the things that has distinguished the NFL from the other leagues and made it as successful as it is.”

Jones says he has no interest in anything but the merchandising.

“I do not want to tear down the concepts of the NFL, no, no, no,” he said. “I just want to create an incentive for those who don’t want to work to market their teams.

“Are you trying to tell me that the Rams and Raiders left Los Angeles because it is not a good market there? Get out of here!”

Wellington Mara, the senior owner of the New York Giants and a man who could have gotten rich with his own deals years ago, notes that Jones has a short memory.

Mara would like to remind him that only six years ago, when the Cowboys were 1-15, Cowboy merchandise accounted for only 3% of the league’s sales.

“Jerry doesn’t have the concept of what it means to be a team and what it means to work in concert with your associates,” Mara told reporters during a recent impromptu diatribe. “You meet the same people going down the pole that you meet going up the pole.”

When the Cowboys do slide back down that pole--and it won’t be this year, not with Deion Sanders--Jones’ colleagues may not recognize certain parts of his team.

In what has been his only truly spiteful gesture in this affair, Jones has ordered that all Cowboy nonplaying personnel--coaches, trainers, etc.--wear plain white shirts and white caps on the sidelines.

If they can’t wear the Nike emblem, he said, then they won’t wear anything, not even the trademark blue star.

Gee, wonder how long it will be before athletic wear retailers--whose sales of Cowboy golf shirts soar the morning after fans see Barry Switzer wearing that stuff on TV--phone the league to complain.

And the league fights back, promising lawsuits later, but only with words for now.

Addicted. Greedy. Silly.

If Jones is addicted to anything, it is to attention.

If he is motivated by anything, it is a need to prove that he can win a Super Bowl without Jimmy Johnson.

And although he indeed has a lot of money, he did not earn it by being silly.

He earned it by sensing there was gold to be found in a dangerous, faraway place. He earned it by loading his life’s possessions on his back and traveling there.

The trip was long and difficult. Safer, slower routes were ignored. Security and reputations were lost.

When this country was still young, people used to be admired for that sort of thing.

Today, these same people are called names.

The owners claim they are mad because Jones had no business going near the gold.

The real reason they are mad is that he got there first.