He's owned the team for 27 years - starting from a deep hole. You conveniently want to only consider the last 20? They have been up and down, a net of about .500 - a helluva lot of teams have done worse - and that's with more than their share of bad luck with injuries.
Regarding the son taking over, make no mistake who still holds the power and has the final say.
What could be more GOOD and NORMAL and AMERICAN than Packer Football?
"The Devine era is actually worse than you remember if you go back and look at it."
KYPack
As I wrote when I looked at the last 20 years, I did it because those are the years of salary cap football. As I said originally, he had success when he could simply outspend other teams, because there was no salary cap. Since he has had deal with a hard salary cap, he is basically a .500 GM. You can't excuse 20 years by "bad luck". He is a ho hum gm under the constraints of a salary cap.
Interesting theory, but I doubt it's true. Jerry Jones barely had the money to scrape together and buy the Cowboys for a bargain price. He more resembled George Halas than say Paul Allen or Lamar Hunt. The team made a lot of money, and the franchise got a lot more valuable, hence he is probably filthy rich now, but I doubt even now that he has the money of some other owners who had billions before buying teams.
What could be more GOOD and NORMAL and AMERICAN than Packer Football?
The Cowboys were widely known to have a much larger payroll than much of the league prior to the salary cap. Maybe there were a few richer owners, but Jones had money from his oil and gas business that he was willing to spend on football players. As I remember it, the Cowboys were pointed at as one of the reasons that a salary cap was needed. They had an owner willing to buy championships.
I didn't recall Jones getting any bargain at the time, in fact I recalled the sale being costly for that day and age. So I looked up prices that other teams were sold for at about that time:
1984 Chargers - $70 million
1984 Broncos - $78 million
1985 Saints - $70 million
1989 Cowboys - $150 million
1994 Patriots - $172 million
1994 Eagles - $185 million
1995 Bucs - $192 million
1997 Seahawks - $197 million
At twice the cost of teams sold just 4 or 5 seasons earlier and only somewhat (15-25%) less than teams sold in the following 8 years, the sale of the Cowboys seemed to set a new value level for NFL teams.