There’s No Mistaking That Smell: Bad Tuna

With the wedding of Jerry Jones and Bill Parcells, the man whose very own book title, “The Final Season: My Last Year as Head Coach in the NFL,” requires correction, the only thing guaranteed is the ugly dissolution of this unlikely union within a couple years, maybe less than that. I can hardly wait.

Thanks partly to an army of bootlickers, Parcells is known exclusively for his football success, not his utter lack of loyalty or integrity in chasing jobs and leaving jobs. But the facts are these: He has been a head coach in three NFL locales, won a Super Bowl in one and wreaked havoc upon exiting three. So mathematically speaking, for $17.1 mil Jones buys a 33-percent chance at a title and a 100-percent chance of experiencing havoc.

We soon will have the answer to another mathematical question: Can the 268,601 square miles of Texas house the egos of both Jones and Parcells, even for a little while? In the meantime, the pairing of two men who’d provide the same answer to the question “How many people know more football than you?” (Their response: Does George Halas still count?) provides clear-thinking, right-minded folks a rooting interest: whoever is playing the Cowboys. Today the Redskins’ comparatively low-key, low-ego tandem of owner Daniel Snyder and Coach Steve Spurrier looks almost sympathetic.

I surely won’t discount the possibility that Parcells’ return will be a blessing for coaching, but I can guarantee it’s a boon to journalism to have him off the airwaves. As a journalist, he has all the credibility of a three-card monte hustler. You’d have thought that a man so connected might have come up with info beyond his own job aspirations and gyrations, too. In what passed for news Thursday, he used radio time to suck up to Jones. Meanwhile, his former employer trumpeted its Parcells tidbits (“The Tuna telling ESPN ...” someone breathlessly announced on ESPN News), as if accepting an employee’s notice of departure merits self-congratulation.

Parcells is probably a Hall of Fame coach but surely a Hall of Fame mind-changer and contract-breaker. He left the Giants so abruptly in 1991 they had to hire his inept buddy Ray Handley as coach, he so grossly violated his contract to bolt the Patriots that the Jets were made to send New England four draft choices, then he left the Jets coachless when his buddy Bill Belichick refused to replace him. That’s when Parcells told us, “I’m done. There won’t be people writing ‘You just never know with Bill Parcells because I’m done with coaching.”

No one bought it because he treats the truth like an expendable, aging lineman. He’s as believable as Jones’ blond hair.

Parcells, who ridiculed Jones in his falsely titled book for over-involvement, threw out the first bit of baloney Thursday, saying “I don’t think there will be disagreements” between him and Jones. Parcells also admitted they hadn’t resolved who has power over personnel. So we already know what the fights will be over.

If there were real Texas justice, the Jones-Parcells Cowboys would go 0-16. But since they do know quite a bit about what they’re doing, they will become a threat in the NFC East as soon as next season. That is, assuming they can put up with each other for that long.