Jerry Jones Drafted From Aboard His $250 Million Yacht
Forget a war room. Jerry Jones has a war yacht.
Ahead of the NFL draft, a lot of attention was paid to the home draft setups of league decision makers. Every day, a new photo emerged of a coach or a GM sitting in front of a Minority Report-like battery of screens, designed to make you think they were taking this draft more seriously than anybody else.
It’s just a conference call, though. All you need is the list of players you’ve been agonizing over for months, a computer to join the league’s Zoom call and one or maybe two phones to work out trades. You can do it from anywhere. In fact, the majority of coaches and GMs drafted from fairly standard home offices. (Bill Belichick was in the kitchen of his Nantucket vacation home.)
Jerry Jones’s office was far from standard, though. Here’s what viewers saw when Jones’s Cowboys were on the clock at No. 17.
ESPN
I thought at first that Jerry was in a basement of some kind. Maybe the circular windows led to an indoor pool, or a sauna. They sure looked like portholes but it would be crazy to think he was on a seafaring vessel, right?
Wrong. Jones, as ESPN’s Don Van Natta points out, was aboard his $250 million yacht, the 357-foot Bravo Eugenia.
Jones purchased the ship in late 2018. It can accommodate 14 guests, plus a crew of 30, and features amenities like a full-sized gym, spa and two helipads.
The ship’s automatic identification system puts it in Miami, docked at Watson Island in Biscayne Bay, where it’s been since March 25.
A lot of people were comparing Jones to a Bond villain when they saw his draft headquarters. That’s ridiculous. He’s just riding out a global pandemic in his quarter-billion-dollar floating hotel, poised to head for international waters if society begins to collapse around him. We haven’t seen that in a Bond movie—yet.
The good, the bad and the ugly of the other home draft setups
Everyone else’s draft rooms were fairly pedestrian, with the exception of Kliff Kingsbury’s ultra-modern living room.
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