NFL fined Dallas Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones received $250,000 for what he said was an “inadvertent” obscene gesture toward fans at the New York Jets' MetLife Stadium on Sunday.
Viral videos captured Jones gave the middle finger to Jets fans during the Cowboys' 37-22 win. Jones claimed that he was actually trying to support the Cowboys fans in the stadium as his team closed in on victory late in the fourth quarter.
“It was unfortunate. It was kind of an exchange with our fans in front of us,” Jones said Tuesday on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas. “There was a crowd of Cowboys fans in the front – not Jets fans, but Cowboys fans. The whole stadium was full of Cowboys enthusiasm, and of course at the end of the game.
“[The gesture] This was unintentional on my part because it happened right after our last landing and we were all excited about it. There was no antagonistic issue or anything like that. I just put the wrong show on the distribution. This was done by accident. I'm not kidding. If you want to call it an accident, you can call it an accident. But things got better pretty quickly. I had the opportunity to look at it. “It was fixed pretty quickly, but the goal was to give it a thumbs up and basically point it out to our fans because everyone was jumping up and down with excitement.”
Jones should have no problem paying the fine – his net worth is estimated at about $16 billion. His fellow billionaire owners have also been fined large sums by the NFL in recent years. The league fined Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper $300,000. for throwing a drink at fans during a game in January 2024, while then-Tennessee Titans owner Bud Adams was fined $250,000 in 2009 for making an obscene gesture toward Bills fans after his team defeated Buffalo.
Jones, who has a flair for publicity, had a busy offseason as he came under criticism from a large portion of the Cowboys fan base when the team traded his best playerpass rusher Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers. He was also central figure of Netflix documentary it told the story of how he turned the Cowboys into the most valuable, though not the most successful, sports team in the world.
