JERRY JONES WANTS FANS TO WATCH DALLAS COWBOYS KNEEL IN PERSON

BY ADAM GREENE

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones cracked open the lid of his coffin Wednesday afternoon, slid out of his crypt, applied the preformed rubber piece he uses as a human face and made a couple of pronouncements concerning his team and how they’ll behave as they embark on what will surely be another futile season.

While many teams have closed the door on fans attending games in person for at least the first few weeks of the 2020 season, Jones has other ideas. Jerry World will be open for fans, at some kind of half (or less) capacity and those supporters will be on hand for what will surely be the first Cowboys players to take a knee during the Star Spangled Banner in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

He’s less excited about that part.

As for the fans in attendance, Jones imagines “pods” of five to 15 people with plenty of room in between, saying with a surgically-straightened face, “I am completely confident that if I’ve ever seen a general population have had information of where the issues are, where the vulnerabilities are, how to conduct yourself, the do-right rule relative to the person with you and beside you that you do or you don’t know, I’m confident that we have very educated situation and that our fans can come and have a safe experience at our stadium along with of course our players having the safety they’re required on the football (field).”

Jones is obviously not on Facebook or Twitter. If he was, he’d see that a significant portion of the football fanbase (I’m generalizing, but come on) feels that the COVD-19 restrictions sometimes mandated by communities and private businesses are somehow stomping on their rights. Those rights? To get themselves and everyone in their community sick with a global plague that has already killed more Americans (165,830) as of this writing since March than died from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

But, you already know that as your uncle in the MAGA hat informed you and all 210 of his Facebook friends in a video filmed in the front seat of his Chevy Silverado.

I imagine, for Jones’ part, this is aspirational right now, based solely on the hope that things will somehow get better in spite of all evidence to the contrary. One could argue, your uncle on Facebook for one, that the fans that plan to attend can choose to put themselves at risk. And I would agree with that if we lived in a future society in which all concession workers, beer hawkers, ushers and stadium security were robots. Unfortunately, they’re not. They’re human beings and they don’t so much “choose” to be there, but require jobs and money with which to buy food and pay for housing so they don’t die.

While in a normal season those fans could expect to see Mike McCarthy flounder around on the sidelines as he’s continually befuddled and flummoxed by the very sport in which he’s paid to coach, they’ll also witness something else; the aforementioned anthem knee taking.

Jones doesn’t want this to happen. He’s very against it in fact, but it’s obvious that his players have informed him (along with the league office) that they will be participating in the protests. So the owner did a little pre-season damage control to keep your uncle from burning his Cowboys gear and posting it on Youtube.

“I want to show the world that I can do it with grace and come up with the right solution,” Jones told the NFL Network. “I don’t know what we’re going to be faced with here a month from now or two months from now. … Our players have always been open-eared for anything that I have to offer and I’ve been open-eared for what they have to offer, and that’s what we’ll do.”

When asked why he was against the protest before, but seems more open to it now, he said, “That was then, this is now,” Jones said. “We’re going to have grace.”

We’ll see what your uncle has to say about that.

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