BREAKING NEWS: Dallas cowboys has finally agreed on signing a young star..….. 

 Billions of dollars back into North Texas with developments that attract other businesses to invest so they can be associated with the Cowboys brand.

“Jerry Jones and his businesses generate not only opportunities for area residents and businesses, but also put the North Texas region in the national spotlight in a very positive way,” said Ray Perryman, an economist who has long studied Texas’ growth.

Sunday’s playoff game against the San Francisco 49ers in Arlington puts the national spotlight on unfinished business for Jones. It has been 26 years since the Cowboys capped off a season as Super Bowl champs.

At 79, Jones’ influence makes him the Jeff Bezos of sports, with ventures touching every facet of the industry, from food and beverages to medical imaging to helping negotiate lucrative TV deals that propelled professional football beyond its rivals. He pioneered the moneymaking potential of sponsorships, creating dozens of “official” brands of the Cowboys for everything from guacamole to casinos.

“Jerry is one of the greatest business disruptors in the history of sports,” Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wrote to The Dallas Morning News in an email. “When he got into the NFL, he looked at the way things were always done, saw a better way [and] made it happen.”

Jones declined through a spokesman to be interviewed for this story. But in a video interview with The News in 2017 when he was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame, Jones said he always carried an “exaggerated view of what the NFL and sports could be. I always thought it could be bigger than life.”

Here’s how that bigger-than-life ambition built a far-reaching legacy for Jones, wife Gene, sons Stephen and Jerry Jr. and daughter Charlotte that’s visible throughout Dallas-Fort Worth and beyond.

Before the Cowboys: The early years

Dabbling in business while playing football at the University of Arkansas in the 1960s, Jones honed his skills by selling life insurance to businessmen and shoes to students in fraternities, earning him the nickname “the Razorback businessman,” he wrote in a 2012 article for Forbes. He also owned a small interest in several oil wells.

While still in college, Jones had an opportunity to get into the fast-food business with either Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s or Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, the first franchise pizza chain in the U.S that peaked in the 1970s. He picked Shakey’s, which once had at least seven locations in Dallas-Fort Worth, all of which shuttered by 1989. He borrowed $1 million from the Teamsters union to get started.

“The rationale was every restaurant in the world makes a hamburger — that’s McDonald’s,” Jones said on a Talk of Fame Network podcast in 2016. “And everybody knows you cook fried chicken at home so Kentucky Fried’s not the deal. But how can you beat that pizza? Of course, that was the wrong choice out of the three.”

When Shakey’s didn’t turn out how he thought it would, Jones went to work with his father, Pat, who had gone from supermarket owner to highly successful insurance salesman. Jerry Jones was executive vice president at Modern Security Life in Springfield, Mo. When the company was sold in 1970, he walked away with $500,000, according to The Oklahoman.

In 1966, just a year out of college, Jones considered buying the financially ailing San Diego Chargers but ended up backing out after his dad warned him against taking on that much debt.

Jones shifted his focus to exploratory oil drilling through Arkansas-based Jones Oil and Land Lease. He struck oil in 12 of his first 13 wells, with the first well yielding $4 million in oil, according to the book The Dallas Cowboys: The Outrageous History of the Biggest, Loudest, Most Hated, Best Loved Football Team in America.

That set up his next big move.

Jerry Jones took a question during a 1989 news conference at Valley Ranch in Irving when he was announced as the Dallas Cowboys’ new owner. Tex Schramm (standing) and H.R. “Bum” Bright (seated) are in the background.(Richard Michael Pruitt / Staff photographer)

‘America’s team’

In 1989, at age 46, Jones bought the Cowboys for $140 million from team owner and friend H.R. “Bum” Bright in the largest deal at the time for an NFL team. The price is equivalent to $302.6 million today.

The Cowboys are now the NFL’s richest team, with $980 million in revenue and operating income of $425 million in 2020, according to Forbes. The team’s overall value is $6.5 billion in Forbes’ latest ranking — or nearly two-thirds of Jones’ estimated net worth.

“Plenty of owners were more wealthy than Jones was when he acquired the Cowboys, so you have to assume [his success] is due to the force of his personality,” said Jonathan Jensen, a former executive with sports marketing agencies in global advertising networks Omnicom and Publicis Groupe. “The things he has already accomplished are things most in professional sports would have said were impossible 20 years ago.”

Jones and wife Gene own 51% of the Cowboys and their three adult children equally share the other 49%, D magazine reported in 2019. The sons and daughter also are significant partners in all other family endeavors.

With “America’s Team” in his possession, Jones set out to leverage the Cowboys’ frequent TV appearances, their perennial superstars and iconic cheerleaders, and their knack for winning into other revenue-generating ventures.

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones (right) raised a Miller Lite with Molson Coors partnerships chief Adam Dettman in September to toast a 10-year extension of the team’s deal with the beer brand. (Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

One of his biggest playing field-changing moves came in 1995 when he rocked the NFL, bypassing the league’s collegial revenue-sharing agreement and striking his own lucrative sponsorship deals at Texas Stadium, the team’s former home in Irving. Until then, NFL Properties had handled such deals and split profits evenly among teams.

He signed a 10-year deal with Pepsi-Cola worth $40 million, The Dallas Morning News reported. Then Nike agreed to pay $2.5 million a year to paint its logo on the stadium, collaborate with the team in building a Nike-Cowboys theme park outside the stadium and for Cowboys coaches to wear its now-ubiquitous attire, according to The New York Times.

Sponsorship deals and naming rights have soared in price since then. In September 2021, the Cowboys and Molson Coors announced a 10-year extension to an exclusive deal for a reported $200 million, according to Sports Business Journal.

Molson Coors, which owns Miller Lite, outbid AB InBev for the right to be the only beer sold at AT&T Stadium, the team’s current home some 20 miles west of Dallas in Arlington. The deal also includes Miller LiteHouse, an 87,000-square-foot event space adjacent to the west end of the stadium, and rights to use the Cowboys name to advertise its products in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Jensen, now a professor of sports administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described the deal as “out of the stratosphere,” with Molson Coors paying a premium to block its rival Anheuser-Busch.

“The fact that the Cowboys could put together a local team sponsorship of $20 million a year is pretty astounding and speaks to the power of the Cowboys brand in North Texas,” Jensen said.

Its marquee sponsors — Ford, Miller Lite, Pepsi, Dr Pepper and Bank of America, among others — have ponied up big bucks for decades to be associated with the Cowboys.

A year after Jones pioneered team sponsorship deals, he began working on other ways to capitalize on the brand. He launched Dallas Cowboys Merchandising Ltd. to design, manufacture and distribute the team’s merchandise to retailers.

At the beginning of this season, sports business site Sportico projected the Cowboys’ locally generated revenue would reach $650 million, including merchandise and non-NFL events at AT&T Stadium.

Bravo Eugenia, the $250 million superyacht that Cowboys owner Jerry Jones purchased and named for his wife, Gene.(Ben Rotsap / Ben Rotsap Photography)

That success carries over into everything Jones does.

In 2016, he bought a custom Airbus helicopter to cut his commute from the Cowboys’ headquarters in Frisco to AT&T Stadium. It reduced a one-hour drive to a 13-minute ride. The aircraft, white with the Cowboys’ blue star stamped on the tail, was an H145 from Airbus Helicopters, a model that starts at $8.5 million. It can seat up to 10 people.

When the pandemic forced the 2020 NFL Draft to go virtual, Jones and crew made the Cowboys’ picks aboard his 357-foot-long, $250 million megayacht. Built in 2018 and named Bravo Eugenia after his wife, the yacht has two helicopter pads, a sauna, plunge pool, gym, garage and beach club.

Pizza, wings and (at one time) doughnuts

Heading into the 2004 season, Jones returned to his fast-food franchise roots with a joint venture between his Blue and Silver Ventures Ltd. and Louisville, Ky.-based Papa John’s. Under the deal, the limited partnership assumed 49% ownership of 71 Papa John’s restaurants in Texas, including locations in Dallas, Austin and Waco.

Papa John’s also became the official pizza of the Cowboys and a Texas Stadium sponsor. As part of the deal, the 71 restaurants would get special co-branded uniforms and delivery vehicles to tout the partnership.

At the end of 2015, Star Papa LP, the joint venture’s name, was involved with 87 Papa John’s locations in Texas, according to the pizza company’s SEC filings. When asked for a current figure, Papa John’s declined to answer but said 87 was “in the right ballpark.” In 2018, Stephen Jones said the team was linked to 50 stores in the Dallas area alone.

Jones also has a connection to Dallas-based Wingstop, which hired him and his former three-time Super Bowl champion and H