There is a way to do business in football and there is the way the Jones family does it. If that reads like a binary, understand that it doesn’t matter to the NFL’s success in many, if not most, ways. This is a television show and a profitable venture long before it becomes a competition, and no one understands that better than Jerry Jones. In fact, he understands it so well that everything else is tangential. Profits, losses, transactions, deadlines, norms: none of these matter if they endanger the dollar.

That’s why a team in the country’s fifth-largest media market, competing in a sport played in no other developed nation in the world, after spending the last 29 years in various states of futility, has become the world’s most lucrative sports franchise become . That’s also why Jerry will probably be down before his football team wins another Super Bowl.

All of that is more important than the team’s decision to part ways with Mike McCarthy this morning. None of this contradicts the idea that McCarthy deserves to be dealt with for his inability to lead Dallas out of its ongoing, three-decade slump. But the way the Cowboys handled that delayed fall, and the way virtually any other team would have done it, is very different.

I went through the basics on FrontBurner last week, and the result remained mostly the same until this morning. While McCarthy’s contract with Dallas expired last Wednesday, Dallas had an exclusive negotiating window with him until tomorrow. That gave the team the right to block other organizations from interviewing the 61-year-old for their own openings, representing the kind of power play that, while possible, is rarely carried out.

The NFL is a fast-paced world outside of Dallas, and so selecting a head coach is less a search and more an arms race, with a handful of prospects trying to outmaneuver each other to attract the handful of exceptional candidates. Attendance is optional, but the price of sitting out is sifting through the leftovers — like, say, a man dining out at a Super Bowl he won 14 years ago thanks in large part to one of the greatest quarterbacks in history .

That should be incentive enough for the Cowboys to play, but if you read Rivers McCown last week, you know this team hasn’t conducted a serious head coaching search since 2007. Some of it could be old-fashioned incompetence. But a much bigger problem is undoubtedly rooted in the same logic that led Jones to fuss about extending CeeDee Lamb and Dak Prescott last summer, and that will lead him to do the same with Micah Parsons, even though Parsons begged for it ensures that a deal is concluded as painlessly as possible.

There is money to be made by being the last one in the attention economy, the outlier – the conversation partner – who violates established norms. To discuss why the Cowboys are stupid for not doing the sensible thing is still to discuss them, which is to pay attention, which is currency in an information ecosystem that spawns and kills stories at warp speed . In most cases, properties that navigate this environment also know how to print real currency. The Cowboys are no exception.

That’s how you end up in the situation Dallas faced last week: non-committal to an employee from whom they’d learned all sorts of data points, yet perfectly content to drag things out at the expense of interviewing for another job pull. (In McCarthy’s case, with the Chicago Bears.) The rest of the NFL doesn’t work that way, either in terms of time – Dallas will almost certainly be the last non-playoff team to part ways with its coach this offseason – or in terms of Restrictions Prevent the non-contractual coach from speaking to other potential employers before opening positions or restricting search processes. So one can only assume that the rest of the NFL was wrong after rumors of McCarthy’s return surfaced over the weekend.

The charitable interpretation is that this was a leverage game. NFL Network’s Tom Pelissaro reports that contract length was the sticking point in negotiations, and it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which Jones tried to suppress McCarthy’s other job prospects in order to pressure him into accepting a shorter, team-friendly contract act.

Less sympathetically, given how extensive Dallas’ data on McCarthy’s performance is and this season has been practically over since October, this is the latest clumsy attempt at a football telenovela with a plot twist – surprise, Mike’s gone after all ! – The timing is set to fall the morning after two of Dallas’ NFC East rivals have each won playoff games.

Both are a sum this damn guy Moving from an owner who is the most this damn guy in the NFL: the latest football embarrassment from a general manager who can’t be fired. But now the media cauldron will simmer and simmer over who will come next to save the irredeemable Cowboys, to save Jerry Jones from himself. As always, it misses the point because it operates under a different paradigm than Jerry Jones, which assumes that the public’s end goal – seeing their favorite football team win the Super Bowl – is far as important as a billionaire’s remaining toys shiniest on the playground.

Jones can’t help but do exactly what he’s always wanted to do, which is why the Dallas Cowboys’ next head coach probably won’t take them much further than Mike McCarthy just did. It’s okay to consider this a failure. But it won’t be the game its owner cares about most.