Troy Aikman: Cowboys' championship drought is hard to fathom

When Troy Aikman won his third Super Bowl with the Cowboys after the 1995 season, he never dreamed that ahead of the 2026 season, it would still be the team's last. Aikman said in an interview with Dale Hansen that it's still incredible to him that the Cowboys haven't been to the NFC Championship Game, let along the Super Bowl, since that 1995 season. "I didn't think it was the last one that I'd be a part of. I thought we would certainly win another one. I thought I would," Aikman said. "It's hard to fathom. It really is. Because we see it, we talk every year about parity, and we've seen teams go from last to first, and teams that have not been historically very good, they still make a run, they make it to a championship game or a Super Bowl, and yet for the Cowboys that hasn't happened. It's hard to put your finger on exactly why." Aikman believes it's unacceptable for the Cowboys to go three decades without a Lombardi Trophy, or even getting close to one. "Cowboys fans deserve better," Aikman said. "I do know that. This is the Cowboys, the flagship franchise, and the fact that the Cowboys in 30 years have not made it to a championship game, let along a Super Bowl, it's hard to fathom." Asked if Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is to blame, Aikman acknowledged that Jones making himself the Cowboys' general manager is a big part of it. "It all does start at the top. Good or bad, it starts at the top. I don't think Jerry would shy away from that," Aikman said. "You have to take responsibility when it doesn't work out, and it hasn't worked out. I've heard Jerry say the reason he hasn't hired a general manager is there are no guarantees and no one can guarantee him that making a change at GM and replacing himself would guarantee that they'd be any better. But if that's your philosophy, then you'd never fire the head coach either. You'd never make any changes because there are no guarantees whatsoever. They've been going down this road so long and yet it hasn't translated to success in January. There has to be a reason for that." Aikman said any team that has had the Cowboys' playoff record should make changes. "To me, you have to make changes in how you're doing it, if for three decades you haven't made an NFC Championship Game," Aikman said. "It's just unacceptable." Aikman said Jones knows that Jimmy Johnson did a great job building the Cowboys' 1990s Super Bowl teams, but Jones hasn't given anyone else the kind of authority Johnson had. "He knows why we won with Jimmy Johnson, and I believe the reason we won is because every player in that locker room felt, and I think knew, that Jimmy was calling the shots, that Jimmy was in control of their destiny, so if you didn't do what you were supposed to do by Jimmy's standards, you were held accountable," Aikman said. "He was a great evaluator of talent, he drafted those players, he built those teams, he was a tremendous general manager — I say general manager, he was a tremendous evaluator of talent and in many ways he was the de facto general manager. I think he was probably better in that role than he was even as a head coach, as good as he was there." Now Jones is the general manager, and has never found anything close to the success of the teams Johnson built.