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Jake Ferguson, with toughness, TD celebrations and dirty jokes, finds his fit with Cowboys

The second-year tight end’s roots as a Wisconsin wild child helped form his gritty, goofy character.

FRISCO — The Ferguson family once worried about Jake.

From kindergarten to eighth grade, the Cowboys tight end attended a small Catholic school where structure suited him like a cage to a condor. He drew reprimands for throwing snowballs and organizing tackle football at recess. He neglected classwork that, to him, lacked real-world application.

Bad at math, he was worse at sitting still. A school administrator once called Jake’s mother, requesting she drop him off on time the next day for a field trip. His mom was confused — she always dropped him off on time.

Jake, it turns out, routinely ducked into a classroom to avoid first-period Mass.

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“I would hide under the bean bags so I wouldn’t have to go to church,” he said. “When the whole school would go off to church, I would eat the teacher’s candy and chill for an hour. … It was the best hour of the day.”

Jake Ferguson grew up wearing a uniform at St. Maria Goretti Catholic School in Madison, Wis. The uniform in Dallas fits him better. As the Cowboys prepare to host his home-state team, the Green Bay Packers, on Sunday in the first round of the NFL playoffs, a Wisconsin wild child has developed into a tone-setter, on and off the field.

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Teammates and coaches consider Ferguson physical and tough, someone who plays with an edge and joy. His childhood experiences can attest: He once put two opponents into an ambulance during a game, and that situation was a distant second to the most outrageous of his young football days: An opponent’s mother punched him on the field.

Beyond grit, Ferguson is the Cowboys’ wild card, their resident joke teller and unofficial creative director of touchdown celebrations. On Thanksgiving, players feasted midgame on turkey legs stashed inside Salvation Army red kettles. In 2022, on Thanksgiving, they played Whac-A-Mole inside a kettle, tight end Peyton Hendershot imitating the arcade game with bonks to teammates’ heads.

Both ideas trace to Ferguson.

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“He is honestly kind of made up,” tight end Sean McKeon said with a laugh. “Someone made him up in a comic or a book or something. He’s a goofy dude. He plays like he’s a kid still. He’s just out there having fun, trying to [jack] dudes up and have some laughs while he’s doing it. … He knows the right balance of when to have fun and when we’ve got to put in the work to get s--- done.”

Coach Mike McCarthy called him a “glue guy,” a term reserved for a player who transcends his position group to bring people together.

“He’s just a total character,” said Joe Ferguson, Jake’s brother and former college teammate at Wisconsin. “He was one of those kids growing up that you’re like, ‘Is this dude going to be all right?’ because he had a lot of good qualities. It was about how he was going to channel those things into something productive. …

“It’s pretty hilarious how it is all working out for him. He couldn’t have chosen a better profession.”

Dallas Cowboys tight end Jake Ferguson (87) runs after a catch as Washington Commanders...
Dallas Cowboys tight end Jake Ferguson (87) runs after a catch as Washington Commanders linebacker Khaleke Hudson (47) defends during the second half of an NFL football game on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2024, in Landover, Md. The Cowboys defeated the Commanders 38-10.(Elías Valverde II / Staff Photographer)

Character development

On Jan. 18, 1999, Ferguson experienced his first brush with authority when a South Dakota neonatal nurse wiped his purple skin. The delivery room waited to hear Jake cry, a milestone moment in a newborn’s respiratory and circulatory systems development.

Seconds passed in silence. She scrubbed harder.

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And harder.

“He wouldn’t even cry,” said Dawn Thomas, Ferguson’s mother. “He just had this look of, ‘How dare you touch me.’ And then they finally smacked him, and he went, ‘Rahhh!’ and kept glaring. It started from birth.”

“The nurse was like, ‘Well, I guess the lungs are all right,’” said Brad Ferguson, his father. “He’s always been a tough little bugger.”

Family members laugh their way through stories of Ferguson’s childhood and how quickly his spirit surfaced, their affection and amusement intertwined. They found him naughty but not bad, frustrating but impossible at which to stay angry. He was determined when he cared about something and immovably stubborn when disinterested.

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Brad estimates his younger son was 3 when he brought him, Joe and Brad’s two brothers on fishing trips. Profanity was known to occur between the adults. A rule became instituted: The boys could curse, too, but only when the boat was on the water.

Jake made it a long commute to the reservoir.

“Literally, two blocks from the house, ‘Can I start cussing now?’” Brad said. “’No, you can’t start cussing until we get on the boat.’ The whole way: ‘Can I start cussing now? Can I start cussing now? Can I start cussing now?’ And as soon as we get on the boat, he would cuss up a blue streak for probably 30 seconds straight. Every cuss word that he would know, he would say them all.

“His brother did a little bit of that, but Jake was like a sailor. He’d say them all, get them out his system, and then we’d go fishing.”

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At home, he could build the world from Legos, his intelligence and creativity clear. Come school Monday, the combination of physical inactivity and classroom conformity was “like asking a fish to climb a tree,” he said. “I just don’t do it. I can’t do it.”

His kindergarten teacher, Anne Curley, said she remembers Ferguson favorably as a high-energy student to whom peers gravitated as a leader. Two decades ago, classroom behavior was commonly regulated through a color-coded card system. All students began the day with a green card. If he or she acted out, the student fell to yellow. Act out again, and the student finished the day on red.

“I averaged a red card a day,” Ferguson said with a laugh. “I think there was twice in my entire kindergarten year I had a green, and it was the first day and the last day.”

His mother said she received, at times, weekly calls from the school. He talked too often out of turn. He played too rough at recess, resulting in football and other games to be banned at certain grade levels. Once, in fourth grade, Thomas said, all his homework was found crumpled in his locker, prompting what she called a “come to Jesus moment.”

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“I think he wrote his book reports in second, third and fourth grade all on the same book, and they never caught him, and I wasn’t paying attention to it,” Thomas said. “He did ‘Superfudge’ three years in a row. I could go on and on and on.”

Fortunately, he had football.

It became his saving grace.

Dallas Cowboys tight end Jake Ferguson (87) catches a long pass down the middle as he’s...
Dallas Cowboys tight end Jake Ferguson (87) catches a long pass down the middle as he’s covered by Washington Commanders linebacker Cody Barton (57) during the first half at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Nov. 23, 2023.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)
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Roughhousing

The rules to basement football were simple.

Jake could stand and run normally. Joe, four years his elder, could move only from his knees, at least until Jake reached the first grade. Whoever possessed the football had to make it past the other. Brad, a former college linebacker who doubled as their football coach from flag football to high school, was sometimes the basement quarterback.

Unlike at St. Maria Goretti, Jake could tackle here. So could Joe.

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By all accounts, Joe grew up kind and well-mannered, a diligent student and avid reader. When he played safety at Wisconsin, he was an Academic All-Big Ten selection from 2014 to 2017. He won the conference’s sportsmanship award his final season. But the Boy Scouts wouldn’t have bestowed a merit badge for how he treated his kid brother. On several occasions, basement football sent Jake’s head or another body part through dry wall, requiring repeated patching.

“I was pretty brutal,” Joe said. “In some ways, I was just as competitive as him.”

Jake wanted to do whatever his brother did. Their age gap demanded Jake keep up.

Basketball. Trampoline basketball. Mini-baseball in the basement. Another basement game called Divers when they’d attempt acrobatic, off-balanced catches onto cushions. Tackle dummies they pulverized. The foundation to Jake’s enjoyment for sports, physicality and overall competitive nature started at home. Joe never allowed his brother to win in anything. When playing each other hundreds of times in the Madden NFL video game franchise, they agree that Jake won exactly once, courtesy of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick’s speed rating.

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Still, they were tight-knit. One of Joe’s friends once picked up Jake and dropped him hard to the ground.

Joe drew a clear line, immediately confronting the friend.

Thomas always wanted to be a boy mom. She grew up around that physical, football-centric environment. Her father is Barry Alvarez, the longtime Wisconsin football head coach and athletic director. She played volleyball, basketball and golf and was raised that wounds require dirt, not Neosporin. No one clamped Joe’s ear for playing rough or babied Jake for any licks.

They were an Addams Family for athletes.

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“I’m not that mom that says, ‘Good luck,’” Thomas said. “I’m the mom that says, ‘Kick their ass.’”

It is ironic Ferguson plays for the Cowboys. He grew up dreading a blue star.

The youth football league in Madison held weigh-ins before each season. Any player weighing more than the allotted threshold for his age received a blue star, which banished him to the line of scrimmage. Jake wanted the ball. So, he traded Oreo cookies for lettuce and hunger before showing up, stripping down to his boxers and making weight. He then devoured three footlong sandwiches from Subway.

Jake and his friends formed a dynasty.

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That meant overpowering some opponents.

In sixth grade, Jake sent two kids into an ambulance during a game, and teammate Billy Wilson added a third on a blindside block. The park at which they played had two available fields, so the game alternated between them, clearing out space for each ambulance. Naturally, the sideline grew heated, parents combative with other parents, questioning whether the boys were truly in the sixth grade. Wilson estimated the game took about three hours.

“People wanted Jake’s head,” he said.

If that drama seems difficult to top, the 6-5 player hit growth spurts before high school. He mostly bounced between junior varsity and varsity football as a freshman at James Madison Memorial High School, since renamed Vel Phillips Memorial. At a JV game against Oregon High School, Jake repeatedly pummeled the quarterback to the point the quarterback quit midgame, taking off his helmet and shoulder pads and walking off, Brad said.

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The quarterback’s replacement entered the game. Jake injured him on a hit.

The injured quarterback’s mother proceeded to broach the spectator area, enter the field section and punch Jake multiple times. Jeremy Schlitz, who served as Memorial’s athletic director at the time and now holds the position for the Madison Metropolitan School District, reviewed his records from 2013 and confirmed the interaction.

“I don’t like injuring guys,” Ferguson said. “I don’t like that at all. You hate to see it. But I hit him, and I remember he just let out a scream, and I kind of backed up. I was like, ‘Woah, we need to get someone over here.’ And then I looked up, and all the sudden, his mom was throwing haymakers at me, out of nowhere. ... I mean, you can punch my helmet all you want. I have a helmet on. But yeah, I was just kind of thrown off. I remember I walked back. I was like, ‘That was a mom.’”

Dallas Cowboys tight end Jake Ferguson (87) hurdles the tackle attempt by Seattle Seahawks...
Dallas Cowboys tight end Jake Ferguson (87) hurdles the tackle attempt by Seattle Seahawks safety Quandre Diggs (6) following a second quarter catch at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Nov. 30, 2023.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)
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Showtime

When the Fergusons worried about Jake’s future, wondering where all his energy could be directed, Joe said a prevailing theory was he might become an actor or media personality. He attracted and embraced the spotlight. He loved telling stories, which he was known to embellish on occasion.

They weren’t far off.

Ferguson, 24, co-stars in a real-life football movie. It’s an action-comedy.

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When time to produce, Ferguson can do that, setting career highs in his second NFL season with 71 catches for 761 yards and five touchdowns. He can seal a gap or overpower an edge defender on a chip block. In the passing game, he can weave around or hurdle over defenders. On Nov. 30 and Dec. 11, he scaled a player in back-to-back wins against the Seattle Seahawks and Philadelphia Eagles, creative as if a basement underdog again.

He also finds space for laughter.

Longtime caddies for Tiger Woods often joked and made off-topic remarks between swings to help lighten the golfer’s mood. In baseball, catchers or pitching coaches sometimes do the same on a mound visit. There is value in sports for someone who can break through the pressure and remind an athlete he is still playing a game.

The Cowboys have Ferguson.

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“He’s just random,” quarterback Dak Prescott said. “Random might be one of the best ways to put it. Obviously, some of it is inappropriate, but at other times, it’s just so random that it doesn’t make sense, but it’s funny. During the game, he’s locked in. But during the TV timeouts, yeah, he can crack some jokes or he can say something about one of the other guys.”

Beyond quips, Ferguson is a walking rolodex for jokes. Teammates were reluctant when asked for specific examples, warning the explicit material is not suitable for print. They, along with Ferguson and Joe, proceeded to share with The Dallas Morning News several favorites Ferguson has told.

They were right. They aren’t suitable for print.

Early this season, softer-spoken rookie guard T.J. Bass was supposed to stand in front of the entire offensive line and deliver a story in a position meeting. Dreading the task, Bass knew where to turn for help. Ferguson taught him a joke about a sperm bank. Bass delivered and was in the clear.

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Cowboys tight ends coach Lunda Wells has built a close relationship with Ferguson.

They navigate every action sequence.

In one last month, Ferguson missed an assignment on a run block against an Eagles defensive end, who tackled running back Rico Dowdle from behind to flare up Dowdle’s ankle sprain. Dowdle later returned, but while he was evaluated during a TV timeout, Wells berated Ferguson on the sideline, his final, sharp-toned message to retake the field and make it right. On the next play, a third-and-6, Ferguson caught a contested pass over the middle, stiff-armed an Eagles safety and ran for a 32-yard gain. He stood, shouted and looked to the Cowboys sideline, punching his chest with his left hand.

End scene.

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“He’s that type of guy that I can coach that way,” Wells said. “You can dive in deep, take his soul out and slap it around, but then put it back into him, saying, ‘Go f---ing make it right.’ He responds. He’s fun to coach.”

Growing up, Ferguson was never a Packers fan. If anything, he said, he resented them for sometimes winning on weekends Wisconsin lost and making the Badgers look bad.

He is ready for the postseason to begin Sunday, regardless of opponent.

“When I was a kid, I was pretending I was in the playoffs,” Ferguson said. “I was doing tournaments in flag football, pretending I was going to the Super Bowl, stuff like that, wanting to get there. I was [saying], ‘I’m playing tight end for the Dallas Cowboys. This catch is to go to the Super Bowl.’”

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He really envisioned himself playing for the Cowboys?

“Nah, I’m just [kidding],” Ferguson said. “But I definitely didn’t say Packers. I can tell you that.”

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